


Practical Magic

by Nightheart



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Soooo Much Magic, This is Gonna Need Magic, What a Mess!, a lot of magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-05-13 01:55:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 143,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5690161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightheart/pseuds/Nightheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One would think that, after cleansing Taint from an Eluvian, simply cleaning a house would be easy by comparison, however when that house is Fenris long-neglected, decrepit, and filthy old mansion, one would be wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Fenris had saved her life. She'd been about to meet the Creators when the demon that their hunting-team had been fighting had broken through the lines and rushed straight at her. Its claws had been about to rip her apart, when he'd just suddenly been _there_ , knocking aside it's blow with a strong swing of his own greatsword. The next swing, along with her bolt of lightning, had finished the demon off. She'd tried to thank him but he'd ignored her thanks in favor of moving on to the next fight.

He'd defended her much the same way back when they had went on adventures with Hawke, but it was different now, or it _felt_ different to her. Back when they'd been mutual companions to Hawke, they'd had a respect for the Champion of Kirkwall in common. Now all they had was nine-years of bickering and the fact they were both getting paid by the city to sweep for Venatori to cement peaceful relations between them. It gave Merrill hope that maybe Fenris might be saving Merrill for her _own_ sake rather than out of loyalty to Hawk, and it made her feel more grateful to him as a consequence.

Later on that day, she'd clumsily fallen into a hole that had been covered over with leaves. The rest of the team had moved on wihout her, not noticing her absence, but Fenris had noticed and had come back to search for her. He'd reached down (rolling his eyes the whole while), to pull her out of the hole she'd been stuck in and lectured her about her carelessness all the while. She'd tried again to thank him but he'd turned it into an opportunity to lecture her about the evil of her ways and how she was destined for inevitable corruption.

 _:If he won't accept a verbal thank you,:_ Merrill thought determinedly, staring up at the exterior of his decrepit old mansion in high town he'd decided to nest in. _:I'll simply have to find another way to express my gratitude.:_

Fenris was gone for the week, out on another adventure to kill slavers (or were the Venatori?) in the far-flung corners of the Vinmark Mountains. He wouldn't be back for a week. That would hopefully be time enough for Merrill to properly express her gratitude for saving her life.

:This place is an absolute sty! The Dalish wouldn't let their Halla nest in this place it's so filthy. It could use a good cleaning!: she resolved to herself, trying not to feel daunted by the seemingly impossible task.

The mansion was huge, and it hadn't seen the good side of some soap and water since before Merrill had come to live in Kirkwall. Merrill eyed the huge cakes of specially-made bespelled soap, the scrub brushes, rags, buckets and other cleaing supplies she'd brought with her, and wondred if they were going to last, and if she maybe wasn't biting off more than she could swallow.

Now Merrill didn't know much about houses in the city, she was Dalish after all. To her eyes, modern houses all looked very nice and tidy (no matter how many times people had remarked that they were "hovels" or "run-down") but that was mostly because she'd spent her time growing up in actual _ruins_. The ruins of the ancient buildings of her people were all worn down nearly to nubs by time, with broken and cracked stone walls caved in, and all overgrown with nature, dirt, detritus and leaves filling every nook and crevice. Compared to that, city-buildings, no matter how run-down they were, all looked like bastions of cleanliness and modernity to her.

So she'd studied the city-dwellings that were "as they were supposed to be" (according to other elves in the Alienage) trying to get an idea of what was considered normal for those who lived in the cities to dwell in.

 _:They like everything all clean and shiny for one,:_ Merrill thought seriously.

Hence the cleaning supplies. The Alienage had no shortage of elves who cleaned those big houses in Hightown for a living who were willing to offer her tons of advice upon the matter.

_:And they fill those big houses with all manner of things... just like they're all magpies with a nest!:_

Every last one of the other companions, even ones who probably had no place to cast stonefist, had all agreed that Fenris' little mansion was badly in need of a good cleaning.

 _:And probably a few houseplants,:_ she thought, eyeing the seedlings she'd brought with her to liven the place up a bit.

She'd decided to take the whole week away from her eluvian (and the blood magic) to express her gratitude to Fenris for saving her life even though she knew he didn't like her. It was very kind of him, and kindness should be rewarded. That, and she had put together some new variants on some old Dalish spells to clean the place and she really wanted to try them out.

Without any further hesitation, Merrill walked into the mansion through the side-door Fenris used after unlocking it with her magic.

"Well!" Merrill sid looking at the place with new eyes she'd trained now to spot the differences between a "normal" interior of a city house and... whatever this was supposed to be.

Before she'd sought an education on modern city houses, she hadn't thought anything of all of the missing tiles on the floors, the abandoned boxes and barrels and overturned tables in all of the rooms, the walls that ran with cracks in them and the chunks missing from the ceilings (some barrels had been re-purposed to catch the rainwater that leaked in from the roof!). Nor had she thought it so terribly unusual that there were corpses allowed to rot in the hallways... the ruins she'd grown up with had supported small ecosystems based on the leavings of dead things so she had been inclined to think the bodies a good thing. The city elves at the Alienage had informed her otherwise.

 _:First things first, they said to always start from the top and work downward!:_ Merrill thought.

In this case, the top in question was the rooftop itself.

_:Judging by all of the buckets he has in here to catch rainwater, this roof had more holes than a sieve!:_

One of the elves, a young chimney-sweep, had taught her how to search for weaknesses and holes in the roof, and another had taught her how those should be properly repaired. She didn't have shingles or nails, and wouldn't have known how to use them if she did... but she did have an elven recipe that would work just as well. There was a particular way they went about weather-proofing their aravells that was proven to keep out even the slight drop of moisture for years after it had been applied. Fortunatly the recipe for the weather-proofing compound was part of the Lore of the Dalish, and thus had been handed down to Merrill from her Keeper.

_:Up we go!:_

Merrill scrambled up the outside trellis of the mansion just as though she were climbing a tree in the forest and got to work.

 _:It's really no different really than finding places in a forest where there's wood rot,:_ Merrill thought.

As a Dalish she knew _all_ about that. The roof was beginning to support its own ecosystem within the rot. Under other conditions she'd have encouraged the growth because she was a Nature Mage, but it seemed that the wood rotting away from the ceiling made holes that leaked water, and that was a bad thing. She carefully mapped out the rot, then stonefisted a boulder into the middle of the weakened area to bring the rotted sections down into the empty rooms below. Those sections of roof that were overtop inhabited portions Merrill poked holes along the edges and lifted the whole section out in one piece with her magic.

 _:Sheesh!_ : Merrill thought, after the fifth hole she'd made in the ceiling. _:By the time I'm done, this rooftop is going to be more hole than ceiling!:_

But her personality was such that if she resolved to do a thing, she did it thoroughly, and if she started something, she finished it, no matter how uncomfortable or difficult it was.

_:And really, it's better to repair it now and prevent further rot than to let it keep getting worse and have the whole thing eventually collapse in on itself.:_

Merrill rather privately thought that the whole "ceiling" thing was a little bit unnatural anyway. A single structure covering such a large area! She didn't see how people who lived in these cavernous houses didn't go their whole lives wondering if the whole thing was going to come crashing in on them.

:I suppose they must have some sort of prevention in place...: she mused, shrugging and turning her full attention to the next task.

Once she'd finished mapping out the rot and taking out the areas of rooftop that were rotted clean through, she surveyed what was left. The holes took out entire sections of roof, but, fortunately the builders had used more beams than seemed strictly necessary, so there was plenty of good, healthy wood there to work with! Merrill sunk her Nature magic deep into the "dead" wood that held up the ceiling and gently coaxed it into a quasi-life once more. The wood remembered that it had once grown alive and healthy on the light of the sun, and so it fed upon the energy of her magic to grow once more. Little offshoots of wood regenerated from the deadened planks nailed into the ceiling that held the roof aloft, pulling outward at her command.

The ceiling creaked a bit as she woke the wood into growth once more, but Merrill carefully guided and directed the growth of the new shoots, braiding the strands together like vir tanadhal, the principle that things working together were stronger than things that were apart. The seams of the wood melded into a nice, sturdy shell that connected with their counterparts on the other side, thus neatly patching the holes in the infrastructure that had been rotted out. She also chased out all the termites and other harmful pests that had taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by neglect to make a bad situation even worse, and cast small, subtle spells in the wood to keep the insects out.

After the wooden beams that had held up the ceiling were replaced, Merrill put one last little strengthening spell into the wood itself, making it strong as steel, then pulled her magic out, essentially freezing everything in its new form. She next placed a large sheet of canvas under the newly grown and strengthened wooden slats and pulled out the heaviest and most awkward of the supplies she'd brought with her; an enormous barrel full of the elven weather-proofing compound that the Dalish called "steel skin".

The Dalish had a recipe they used to strengthen and weatherproof their aravells while still keeping them light enough for the halla (who were not large or very strong) to pull. It was usually very difficult to make because the ingredients came from many different places, so a Clan usually had to trade or harvest the materiel themselves in order to make an aravell using steel skin. Merrill now lived in a _city_ however, and things from all over congregated here like it was a perpetual arlathvenn. She'd been able to simply _purchase_ the materials she'd needed and prepare the mixture herself!

Steel skin was a thick, gooey, viscous material in its formative state. One dipped large, long strips of paper or thick cloth into the warmed mixture and then spread the dripping, messy, slightly sticky strips over whatever framework one wished to build on. The strips then dried over the course of two days (and usually the framework was removed) leaving behind a thick "shell" that was easily as strong as steel but so light that even a child could lift it up. She didn't have teams of builders or shingles, but she knew enough about weatherproofing aravells to keep the roof over his head from leaking!

The process, as she well knew, was a long day of hot, messy, sweaty work because the strips had to be kept uncomfortably warm while they were placed and then allowed to cool slowly in order to properly form the steel skin shell. Merrill dipped and plastered, then dipped and plastered some more, working the roof top in sections under the hot sun. The sun beating down on her was both a blessing and a curse; it helped keep her steel skin strip hot as she layered them on, but it also made her hotter and sweatier as well. She determinedly kept to her work, no matter how uncomfortable it made her, pausing only to drink from the bucket of drinking water she kept on hand. After the first three layers, she poured on a nice thick coating of the goop itself, sealing all around the edges of the holes in the roof with a trowel and cementing it in place with her magic by instantly drying the edges. Then she got straight back to layering _more_ soaked strips overtop of the plastered-on compound until the result was a shell that would be four inches thick, but strong enough to withstand the worst storm, and utterly weatherproof.

It was nearly sundown by the time she was done with her roof-patching task and she was sweaty and exhausted. Before she called it a done task, she went to each chimney on the roof with a stuffed wad of soap-soaked rags and used force-magic to push it down the chimney-pipe, scrubbing years of ash and soot that had collected along the brick sides... and probably making an even bigger mess of the rooms below.

She was not looking forward to the walk back to her little house in the alienage (and the possibility that she might get lost on the way) plus there were gangs and slavers that came out at night, so Merrill decided she'd just camp in one of the unused rooms. When she entered the house, she felt the cavernous place was spooky at night and she wondered how Fenris could actually endure it enough to live there all this time. She trudged up the stairs with a wisplight to light her way and picked a room at random near his own living quarters, one that still had a hearth in it. She curled up by hearth in a nest made of old blankets she'd scavenged from a pile nearby. They that smelled strongly of mildew and potentially of animal leavings, and Merrill resolved right then that the washing of linens was going on the to-do list.

 _:I'm sure I've made an even bigger mess of the place!_ : she thought in mild dismay as she took in the state of the upper rooms that had had the ceilings remodeled right down into them.

There was muddy dust mixed with chunks of crumbled wood that had rotted until it was black. The horrid mess was slimy to the touch and slightly putrid. Added to that disgusting slime was a fine sheet of black soot. And all of this was added on top of the terrible state of neglect and mess that had _already_ existed before she'd started her self-imposed project.

Merrill resolved that she wasn't going to worry about how much dirtier she seemed to be making things in her attempts to clean them. Sometimes a surgeon had to make a bit of a mess in order to heal the patient properly or things got worse.

:It might be a mess now, but the roof doesn't leak anymore, and judging by the number of bins Fenris has littering the floor around here that's an accomplishment in and of itself!:

With that optimistic thought to cheer her, Merrill tried to make her sore, tired body a bit more comfortable in her hard, lumpy, smelly bed, and she closed her eyes to let sleep overtake her. She slept in a sleep so deep not even demons could reach her.

She woke the next morning hungry and sore from all of the unaccustomed toil of the day before. Merrill was no stranger to hard work, but most of the work she was accustomed to was either magical or intellectual in nature. She set herself a simple breakfast going on the hearth of bread toasted with cheese and a mash of grains seasoned with sweet-bark and went through an entire regimen of stretching and limbering exercises while she waited for her breakfast to cook.

 _:First task today... those glass panes on the ceiling in the main room!:_ Merrill thought to herself. _:Since I've weatherproofed the rest of the roof, there's no point in leaving a task half done.:_

If there was one thing she knew and knew well after all of her work with the eluvian, it was glass! Eluvians were made of some fancy ancient long-lost elven recipe called silverglass. With an eluvian, there was an entire network of spells woven into it that was as intricate as a spiderweb (if a spiderweb was something like five miles deep and riddled with magic!). That spell-web was the _real_ reason Merrill couldn't repair the mirror once she'd cleansed each shard of Taint, she needed a way to repair the intricate spellweb within the mirror.

 _:Ordinary glass however... no problem!:_ Merrill thought cheerfully. _:I've done tons and **tons** of research and practice on mage-crafting ordinary glass, when I was researching to get the hang of hopefully repairing the eluvian.:_

Hopefully, it was just going to be a matter of repairing the ceiling glass and all she'd need to do was piece the shards of the glass into place, then meld them by melting them back together into a solid sheet with a very careful heating spell. Merrill set about locating the missing shards of the ceiling glass by using a Finding spell based on the Law of Similarity. The glass had all been one solid piece and so the matrix of the crystalline structure was all the same, she simply used what was left in the widow to create a magical resonance to locate the rest of the shards. Much of it had been blown into off cracks and corners by animals of people or the weather over time.

 _:Well... that's... **inconvenient**!:_ Merrill thought a bit put-out when, hours later, she'd located all of the glass shards still left in the house and pulled down the broken panes and windows they belonged to and discovered that there were pieces of the panes that had gone missing over time!

 _:And really, who uses something as breakable and delicate as **glass** in their ceilings and walls anyway?!:_ she fussed to herself.

She would have thought they'd be more worried about the glass in their ceilings and walls coming cashing in on them at the first real storm. She knew they used the lead panes to hold them together, like she would have used a pole-frame to hold up the ceiling of her ger, but still... weren't they worried about those things? Didn't they have any common sense?

 _:I'd have used Elven steel-glass if I were them!:_ Merrill thought with a superior little sniff.

But of course they _couldn't_ use elven steel-glass because they did not know the recipe to elven steel glass; it was only passed down among the elvhen, or rather, among the Dalish. Merrill had often been simply handed lore and told to remember it, but the Dalish didn't and couldn't actually _use_ it because of the nomadic way they lived. Windows were things that were really for more settled structures like houses.

 _:But... even if it's the abode of a shem, I am making the work for an elf so I don't suppose it's actually against the rules!:_ she thought brightly.

In short, Merrill had never gotten to try out that piece of lore she'd been told to remember and she _really_ wanted to try it out! If it was for an elf, there could be no objection she was sure.

She had been piecing together all of the broken window panes and ceiling panels shed found with missing bits of glass in the main room of the house, the one with the stairs and the ceiling panels. She now had a whole lot of mostly-pieced-together broken glass panes lined up neatly across the room. If she was going to do a thing, she may as well do it thoroughly, and it would probably be easier (and more sensible) in the long run if she just did all of the glass panes in new steel glass panels instead of just a few of them.

"Stonefist!" she cried, sending a few pebbles from the detritus littering the room up into the glass ceiling panels and shattering them, sending crystalline shards of glass raining down in sunlight sparkles onto the floor below. The ceiling was now completely open and the breeze wafting into the room was actually quite pleasant. Merrill used her magic to gather up all of the shards into one big pile and moved it out to the patio off of the inner courtyard tucked behind the house out of view of the street.

 _:No sense in risking burning down the house!:_ she thought cheerfully as she swept all of the glass into one large, thick metal cauldron that had been used for Creators only knew what before she'd found it, cleaned it out and decided to re-purpose it for her melting pot.

Instead of a flame spell (which usually attracted the wrong sort of attention), Merrill settled on a spell that increased the heat alone. She grew the heat on the shards inside the pot slowly and steadily, building it up until the glass slowly began to melt, turning from a crystalline solid back into a liquid. When all of the shards had melted together into a liquid that glowed orange-white, Merrill carefully added in a large portion of the steel-skin compound and mixed it in with the molten silica. Her magic told her when the mixture had bonded together enough that it would form a cohesive new crystalline structure and she began to carefully cast the spells on the substance itself. The spells were there to strengthen the structure just as the crystalline matrices had formed, ensuring that they would form into the proper patterns and not some other combination.

Despite the regularity in its crystal matrix, ordinary glass was brittle, so it was never wise to attempt to trust large panes of it. It was too easily broken; objects could shatter it, severe changes in temperature could crack it, it was not very good at bearing its own weight. Steel-glass was different however, it could adjust to heat and cold but did not grow brittle as easily due to the spells and the strengthening agent mixed into it.

 _:I don't have any lead to put it together the way the original people who designed the original panes did.:_ she thought to herself, slightly concerned that she wouldn't have everything back in place in time _._

She wasn't worried that she wouldn't think of something. Merrill had already thought of plenty of clever ways to work around magical limitations though the magic required of cleansing taint from shards of an eluvian was stronger than any lesser solution she'd come up with, thus requiring her to rely on blood magic. The lead panes were probably a bad idea on the whole.

_:Don't they know that lead is poison?! I've seen idiot shem eating and drinking out of pewter like it's nothing and then wondering why they're getting sick.:_

The crueler shem, the elves did not feel particularly sorry for, and didn't go out of their way to advise the shem on what was considered common knowledge among the elves... that was that the pewter and lead they all had in their homes and their utensils was making them ill.

"I'll just stick the panes together with steel-skin glue supported by ironbark vines!" she decided, since she didn't have a conventional method to use, she'd just use an unconventional one.

Ironbark was usually grown in tree-form out in the woods, and the Dalish were the only ones who knew how to work the substance. It was lesser known knowledge passed down among the Keepers that the ironbark plant itself could be manipulated into growing in different forms. Most usefully, a Keeper could manipulate the inner structure of the plant's codex to make it grow in a vine form instead of just like a regular tree. It was difficult and the vine generally didn't live for very long, but it usually didn't need to. Once grown into the shape that a Keeper wanted the ironbark structure to take, letting it die that way would maintain that shape in a substance that was even stronger than Dwarven steel.

Merrill made a mold for the glass out of a large, smooth sheet of metal she'd found, using a water-leveler to make it perfectly level so that one part of the glass was not made thicker than another part. She used her magic to carefully tip the cauldron of molten steel-glass into the mold and waited for the thick, molten glass to spread evenly across the mold. While it was still liquid, Merrill activated the spells she'd laid in; strengthening the glass-steel and snapping the correct combination of magical bonds into place. She then sank her magic into the substance and with a strange twisting, pulling motion with her magic, she banished all of the heat energy, while simultaneously forcing the crystalline matrix of the glass to form into the exact formation she wanted of it. The glass cooled instantly. Merrill carefully lifted up the panel when the mold had cooled enough.

 _:Moment of truth!:_ she thought.

She stonefisted several rocks against the panel, making them move harder and larger as she went... trying to shatter it. They bounced off!

"Enalsaliin!" she celebrated victoriously.

She eyed the panel and then the gaping hole in the ceiling.

 _:One down, a whole lot more to go._ :

It got easier with practice and by late afternoon when Merrill was ready to call a halt to have lunch (for magic was hungry work). She had thirty of the large sheets of steel-glass resting stacked against a wall. It was certainly more than she needed, but that was the number she'd ended up with since she didn't want to waste all of the steel-glass in the batch she'd made, she went ahead and used it all figurig that she' eventually find a use for the extra panels. Her lunch was warmed leftovers from her breakfast, and Merrill began growing an ironbark vine in one of the sadly abandoned and neglected houseplant urns that she pulled up on top of the roof to collect what energy it could from the sunlight while she ate her meal.

Using the former wooden panes as a lattice, like the trellis in a normal house, Merrill force-grew the ironbark vine, feeding it with her Nature magic. She sent it weaving and wrapping round the structure of the panels like the vines of grapes growing on a trellis. Once the ironbark vines had completely taken over the entire lattice, Merrill dissolved the original wooden structure, anchoring the vines in places along the edges of the hole in the ceiling. She pruned out the few leaves that had sprouted and "pulled" the life-energy from the plant, killing it and leaving behind the steel-rope structure to support the glass panels.

She pulled the steel-glass panels up onto the roof one by one, cutting the palm of her hand open before she'd thought to wear protection on her hands, then laid the glass panels out on the steelvine netting, pulling across the errant vine here and there to support the glass better. She lined them up then sealed in the cracks between the panes with steel skin goop that was quickly becoming more solid the longer she had left it to cool. The skylight over the main room of the house had once been full of holes and now was once more entirely covered over with glass, and Merrill felt proud of herself for having accomplished it. Next went hunting through the rest of the house, replacing all of the broken windows with steelglass panes. It was evening and the sun was setting by the time she'd finished.

 _:Two days in, and I haven't even started the **real** cleaning!_: Merrill thought to herself as she served herself a bowl of soup from the ever-simmering soup-pot she'd kept on the hearth all day for her meals.

The floors and walls were still filthy from the mess she'd made, though the new ceiling patches were setting nicely. She took a moment to admire the glass panels she'd laid in all nice and clean and shiny. She hoped Fenris liked them.

 _:I hope he doesn't get back before I finish!_ : she thought with a small pang of guilt.

She knew he liked his privacy, and she knew she was invading it without asking him but... he was so stubborn otherwise!

 _:Besides, if this place had gotten much worse it really would have caved in on him!:_ she justified to herself as she curled up in her nest of blankets for the night. Tomorrow she would start in on the actual house itself. It was going to need a lot of water and a lot of soap!

_:And a **lot** of magic...:_


	2. Chapter 2

The morning woke her near to dawn, with bright golden rays seeping in through the new windows she'd put into the room she'd found to nest in. It looked better already! But it also looked worse because she could see the extent of the mess she'd made in the now-bright light of morning. The damage hadn't been as obvious when the glass had been dingy and clouded with grime. She ate her breakfast of more soup with the last rock-hard end of the bread warmed to palatability with the heat from the fire. She'd need to go shopping soon, but she supposed that might wait.

She had the upper floor to clean today.

Merrill hadn't been invited on a tour of the house, so she wasn't exactly certain how large it was. Naturally, she went curiously poking through all of the rooms, most of which had been barricaded or boarded up for some reason. On one side there was a largish room with decrepit looking furniture that had been dismantled by rodents with three rooms shooting off from it that looked like they might have been bedrooms for children and a teacher, and there was another door that led to a cheerfully tiled room with a copper tub and pipes in it.

The only room that was even remotely approaching clean was the master suite, which Fenris had been occupying in all of the time he'd lived there. Not wanting to invade his privacy any more than she already had, and thus invite Fenris' ire down on her head, Merrill had merely poked a nose in to look about curiously then backed out and shut the door. Her glance had revealed a small balcony overlooking the inner courtyard that had been barricaded by a large bookcase and some additional heavy furniture, a number of bookshelves, a bed, a bench and piles of lived-in detritus scattered messily about. 

Directly adjoining the master suite was a tiled room that had a shiny stone sink with strange pipes leading up to it and a large green tub big enough for even Fenris to lie down in. There were two other rooms off to the other side of the master suite; one that was papered with flowers and doilies and fluffy things that Merrill assumed was some room for the wife, and a study on the other side for the husband.

Curious about the tiled room snce it had something Merrill had read about but never seen for herself, she let herself into that room ad poked about. It was... nightmarishly filthy.

 _:The house has those clever dwarven water-pipes all over inside of its walls, I wonder why Fenris doesn't use them more?:_ She mused to herself as she took a closer look at exactly how much water she was going to have to haul (or simply create by magic) that day.

Curious about the pipes now, Merrill followed one from the tap in the tiled room and followed it around the house. Then she looked outside and found out what Fenris used for water supply instead of the dwarven pipes... Fenris had created a system of barrel-cisterns with the rainpipes on the edges of the roof to collect water rather than use the dwarven water-pipes in the house. Merrill's curiosity prompted her to wonder what was wrong with all of the pipes that he wouldn't use them since they were obviously put in there for the purpose. She'd read about them in a book!

Merrill sank her magic into one of the pipes and traveled along in, reading its resonance to "see" it by magic in order to investigate the problem. At first she'd thought it was because the pipes themselves were green with copper oxidation, but further inquiry with her magic revealed that they weren't damaged or corroded, _despite_ a long period of neglect. She sent her magic questing out farther along the pipe, seeking the source of the mystery.

 _:Oh!:_ she thought in surprise as she followed the pipes down beneath the house. There she discovered some sort of strange jam in the works a little ways underneath the house itself. _:It seems to be stopping water from coming in or out of the place.:_

Merrill continued to push her magic outward, looking around to figure out what was going on. She could sense other pipes with water and organic matter flowing nearby and figured that Fenris' pipes were _supposed_ to be doing the same thing.

_:There's plenty of clean water flowing down that pipe, and the other pipe leads to the sewer. I wonder why there's this... **thing** blocking the way.:_

She probed at it with her magic and discovered that it was lodged-in tight, like a cork in a wine bottle, and that there were, puzzlingly enough, _chains_ binding it down so that it couldn't be moved.

 _:We'll just see about **that** ,_: Merrill thought with a sniff, taking it as a challenge.

She sent her magic burrowing down to where the obstructions lay, then froze the chains to make them brittle and easy to break. She then took hold of the large wooden obstruction with her magic and levied a force-spell on it ramming it outward. The weakest of the chains, made brittle by the cold, fell away. The obstruction loosened, and Merrill twisted it hard, trying tensile pressure if pure brute force wasn't going to work. The last chains weakened, shattered, and water flowed up into the pipes once more. Merrill scrubbed the inside of the pipes with her magic and allowed the water to push up the dirt and corrosion that had settled in over time.

 _:Ick!:_ she thought when the first bit of water to burst out into her bucket was black and sludgy with creators knew what nastiness. She pitched the first few buckets-full  out into the gutters and waited for the water to flow cleanly into the sink.

She'd spent _years_ cleaning Taint from the shards of an eluvian so she knew a thing or two about how to cleanse things. Magical cleansing, however, was a little different from physical cleansing. For one thing, she could rely on soap and water and not just spells to do a good portion of the work!

_:All of this tile on the walls should make this room easier to clean, so I think I'll start here. It'd be better to get some practice on a surface like this before I take on anything more challenging. I am out of practice with that water spout spell, as it's been a number of years since I've last used it.:_

Merrill had targeted the little tiled room with copper the pipes and the green tub just off the masters suite that Fenris had taken over. She was starting with this room because it was completely covered in tile along not only the floors but the walls as well, and that would make it easier to clean. Merrill had made the lye-soap herself by hand and had instilled in the soap several spells she knew to make cleaning easier. She pushed the water up through the pipes, waiting for it to come out clean, then filled up the ( _disgusting!_ ) tub and melted a quarter cake of bespelled cleaning soap that she'd made for herself to help her in her task.

She'd also brought up a number of empty barrels scavenged from around the house, and these she filled with water from the sink and rolled along the halls to the doorways of the other rooms to use later.

_:I think before I actually start cleaning, however, it would make more sense for me to clear out whatever I can do now, so I won't have to waste time on it later.:_

Next she walked through the entire upper floor, pulling down curtains that rained with dust and soot, and tapestries that were utterly filthy, and reclaiming the linens in each of the rooms, many of which had been made into homes for the local wildlife. She threw them down the stairs into the atrium to form an enormous pile of cloth to be washed at same point in the future. Those linens that were only good enough for rags, Merrill ripped up and added to her pile of cleaning rags and the rest could be washed later on.

:Well, collecting all of the cloth has just been managed,: she thought once she'd finished collecting the pile into laundry mountain.

Next she methodically went room to room, gathering up all of the trash that littered each room and simply turning it all to ash with her magic. She gathered up all of the pots that Fenris had used to catch water from a leaky roof. She ashed the junk that had been dragged in from the streets and used to substitute for the furniture that the squatters who had taken over the mansion (before Fenris) had burned for kindling when they'd been staying there. There was a _lot_ of trash too; leaky barrels, broken crates, emptied wine bottles, stacks of litter... that all had to be either carried out or expediently turned to ash on the spot.

 _:Now, I suppose we get to the real work,:_ Merrill thought, turning her attention directly to the grimy, disgusting bathroom of the master suite that Fenris had boarded up.

There was mold on the tiles, dirt caked on the floor, whole generations of spiders had built civilizations in all of the corners, the nasty grime grown over the copper tub had probably achieved sentience.

 _:I don't know if there's enough soap in all of the world to save this room!:_ Merrill thought with a grimace.

She'd lived in ruins out in the wilds that were more sanitary! Merrill went about "keying"her bespelled soap to all of the various types of grime, grit and dirt in the room so that the spelled soap would pick it up by attracting it with magic via the Law of Similarity when she ran the soapy hot water over the surface. Once the soap was prepared, Merrill decided to start the cleaning by washing out the tub, scrubbing it clean enough for her to use in the rest of the washing.

 _:It's not supposed to be green at all!:_ she realized in shock once she had scrubbed it down. _:It's actually copper!:_

She then drained it and filled it with water, which she then heated with magic and melted half a cake of her keyed spellsoap into. Merrill was ready to begin the big clean.

_:This should be fun, I hope this works!:_

She sank her magic into the now soapy water, swirling it around and around until it formed something like a waterspout that she gently, deftly lifted up out of the tub with magic. It had been a while since shed performed the tricky magic of water-shaping. Ice spells were much easier since the water was already a solid frozen mass, it just needed to be shot with force in a direction. Water was fluid and much more difficult to control. She held the spiraling water ever-swirling in front of her, keeping it constantly in motion so that it could gather energy, and then she gathered force in her hand behind it. Looking up to gauge her direction Merrill "pushed" with a strong, heaving gesture and shot a powerful stream of water directly at the ceiling.

"Ooops!" Merrill thought with a wince as the stream of water left a little dimple in the plaster of the ceiling. "Too strong."

She adjusted her force and tried again, this time flattening her stream so that it was more of a spray and covered a wider area. The soapy water rushed upwards, splattering all over the place. Merrill carefully adjusted the direction of the stream, spraying down the entire ceiling, then moving down the walls, blasting away at the dirt and mildew that had grown there over the years.

"It's been a while since I did this water-spout trick, I'm quite out of practice," she murmured to herself.

There had been a time once, when she'd lived with her clan among the Dalish when she had sometimes liked to mischievously spray people when they'd all bathed in the lakes and streams together. Her Keeper had used to scold her about it.

Soon, all of the walls were soapy and wet, and there was a small river of water all over the floor. She manipulated the water on the walls and ceiling and floors, wriggling it around to get it into every nook and crevice, pulling out years of accumulated dirt and loosening it enough to be easily cleaned away. The soap she'd melted into the water went immediately to work, attracting all of the dirt as Merrill blasted away at years of collected grime and nastiness on the walls and ceiling.

The tiles, she discovered to her surprise (and disgust) were not actually a yellowish color mixed with large plots of black, but were supposed to be a patterned in white and green! The tub also was not green, it was copper! Black rivulets ran down all of the walls before she was finished making a full circuit of the room and she was tempted to learn to stop breathing for fear she'd inhale something she shouldn't.

 _:Next, the brushes!:_ she thought.

A carefully controlled variation on the stonefist spell launched a small army of hard-bristled scrub-brushes at the walls and ceiling. Most mages used the stonefist spell to lift large chunks of earth and launch it at a target, this was because it took a great deal more skill and concentration to manipulate something so small with magic, and handling more than one object was even more difficult. Merrill was a far more skilled mage tan most who knew her gave her credit for. Working in conjunction with the water-laden with soap bespelled to remove dirt and grime, the brushes only took a few scrubbing passes before they had scoured down to the original tile and removed every last speck of grime, mold and whatever other nastiness had accumulated over years of neglect, revealing to Merrill the shiny, smooth, sparkling glass tiles, marble sinks and those funny dwarven bowls that removed waste with water.

 _:It's so bright and shiny in here!:_ Merrill admired her work after she'd drawn a fresh tub of water and rinsed the walls a few times then sent the cleaning water down the drain and washed out the now-sparkling copper tub for the final time.

In less than an hour later Merrill's brushes and soapy water had scrubbed down every last surface into glistening cleanliness!

 _:On to the next!:_ she told herself, walking out of the now sparkling clean (and soapy-smelling) bathroom and across Fenris' mess of a bedroom into the former private study of the former master of the manse.

:I'm no judge of houses, but surely this was never meant to look this way,: she thought surveying the former master study.

There was soot from the chimney-swept hearth everywhere, and it was also directly underneath where Merrill had had to bring down part of the roof so there was soggy, rotted wood resting on the cracked stone tile of the room as well. The built in furniture was all going to need a lot of work to replace it!

Setting to work, Merrill heated the water in the barrel she'd rolled to the doorway and melted in another portion of the bespelled soap she'd Keyed to the dirt in the room. Now more practiced at it, it took considerably less time for Merrill to coil up a spout of water from the barrel and begin blasting away at the ceiling and walls. Her army of scrub brushes followed the soap, scouring the walls down to the cool stone they'd been sheathed in. She rinsed the walls from another barrel of water and forced the dirt-laden rinse-water all to flow into the newly cleaned hearth. Rather than allow the floor to remain flooded with dirty water or try to mop it all up, Merrill simply used her magic to "steam" the water away, evaporating it out and leaving behind a sizable pile of dust in the hearth.

"Whew!" she celebrated to herself as she surveyed her work. "Well that's two rooms down!"

She had more barrels and more soap and more rooms to go. So many rooms, and most of them were bigger than this one.

"Why does he need to live in such a huge place anyway?" she muttered to herself. "He can't possibly keep it up."

It was a lot of work, and she had magic to help! The shem who lived in places like this employed other people to help keep all of their things clean. She couldn't imagine Fenris doing such a thing; he was so careful with his coin.

Merrill repeated the same process in the next room over. She heated the water in the barrel and melted another cake of bespelled soap in the hot water and blasted the walls and ceilings with a hard jet of soapy water with enough force behind it to knock over a mabari hound. The water-spouting trick slowly came back to her the more she did it, and magically manipulating the brushes to scrub the ceiling and walls and floors in the second room got easier, though it was still a task that required a great deal of concentration.

_:After this, I think I'll be ready for a break!:_

Using so much magic however did take its toll, and by the time she went to the third room, Merrill was feeling a bit weak-kneed and in need of something to eat to refuel. Using magic was just like excersizing physically, the tasks themselves might be simple, but the amount of vigor required to do the work took its toll and a wise mage knew to pace herself or risk exhaustion. Merrill ate a small lunch, gave herself an half hour rest, then trudged back up the stairs to keep at her task.

The well rested feeling she'd started out with had dissipated and Merrill was left with a feeling of it all being actual _work_! Still, she was stubborn, and not one to leave a task unfinished. She pushed herself to keep at it, promising herself periodic rewards once shed accomplished a certain amount of tasks. She had used to do the same thing while she'd been Marethari's student and tasked with learning _all_ of the accumulated Lore of the Dalish... not most of it, not only what interested her, _all_ of it, even the stuff she found difficult to understand. So when she'd spray-rinsed and scrubbed down the entirety of the next room she'd started on and the outside hallway, she promised herself a small bag of candy from a candy shop in one of the Hightown markets as a reward. When she moved onto the next, strength flagging, she promised herself a special lunch with some of that delicious cheese from the market once she was finished with her mission.

Lunch was washed down with a lyrium potion, the nasty, slightly metallic-tasting beverage added to the resupply of energy provided by the rest and the meal gave her a second wind, enough to complete the another three rooms before she started to feel the effects of the strain on her magical reserves again and she called another break.

The last push of the day had the last of the bedrooms and the smaller bathing room in it. Despite the neglect they'd suffered from, the two smaller bedrooms were both easier and more difficult to clean than the office and Governess' quarters had been, because Merrill discovered that some _idiot_ had papered the walls with brightly painted paper patterned to look like flowers... that was laced with lead and _arsenic_!

 _:Who does this?!:_ Merrill ranted to herself. _:Are they stupid? How can they not realize that this paint is going to kill or sicken anyone who lives in this room?!:_

She ripped the paper off from the walls with magic (not daring to touch it or breathe it in) carefully disintegrated it into ash. Then she sealed up the poisonous remains in a few large glass jars she'd found and sealed the lids firmly, resolving she was going to find a way to dispose of the dangerous substance safely. The water-blasting and scrubbing and rinsing took care of the last few remains for Merrill had carefully bespelled her soap to catch every last trace of the poison and gather it up.

The last bathroom was comparatively easy to clean for the simple fact that they were walled and floored entirely in smooth shiny tiles that needed little more than a simple hose down and whatever small dirt evaporated from the walls... the mold that had grown Merrill simply turned to ash with a spell and sprayed away. The next bedroom was no more difficult than the other empty rooms had been, there was a hearth in it and it was covered in soot but she rinsed and scrubbed it easily.

The very last room, which had once been the Mistress' sitting room next to the master's study, however, had an unforseen complication... the wood of the floor had rotted from the leak in the ceiling above and Merrill nearly went right _through_ it the first time she'd tried to step on the floor!

 _:Well that can't stay there!_ : she thought to herself. _:If someone tries to use this room, it'll be a disaster!:_

Her innate sense of responsibility couldn't let her leave it the way someone might get hurt. It was a good thing that all of the furniture that had once been in the room; the bed, the couches and chairs and tables, had all been carted out and used for kindling long ago, otherwise the weight of them would surely have collapsed the floor into the room beneath it.

The room itself was rather pretty, with white plastered walls, and pretty nature pictures, and large airy windows that opened out to overlook the inner courtyard. The placement was nice too, it didn't get direct sunlight but it got a lot of light all the same.

: _Let's see how far the damage goes,:_ she thought. _:If it's only a little bit, I'll just knock out the rotted part and cover it with a board or something. Fenris actually lives here, **he** can do something about it if he wants!:_

She sank her nature magic in and mapped out the rot, dismayed to discover that nearly the entire floor, starting in the middle and moving out to the walls, was either weakened or rotted through. The whole floor would need to be replaced.

 _:I have no more steel-skin solution left to patch it like I did the roof,:_ she fretted.

She considered leaving it that way, but she just _knew_ Fenris would carp and fuss, regardless of the fact he hadn't been using it. She thought for a minute.

 _:I still have several of those steel-glass panels from replacing the roof and all of the windows yesterday,:_ she thought to herself, coming across an idea. _:I could meld two of them together and that will certainly be strong enough to bear whatever weight anyone might care to put on it, especially if I support it with a net of ironbark cables to give it extra support.:_

She looked at teh size of the area she was expected to cover and then fatalistically shrugged her shoulders. As she'd often heard Varric say... in for a copper, in for a sovereign.

_:Might as well do the whole floor, the panels are rectangle and there's no sense trying to cut them to fit a round hole.:_

Merrill cut and knocked in most of the rest of the floor, grew out some branches from the healthy wood to form a lattice, then hauled in another iron-bark vine plant and grew it around the trellis. Just as she had for the ceiling in the previous room she'd worked on. This time she wove the tendrils of iron-bark vine together so that it more closely resembled a steel netting, like fishnets from the harbor. She then anchored the ends of the ironbark vines by weaving them securely into the ends of the wood flooring still left at the edge of the room. She pulled out the life in the iron bark vines, leaving behind only the steel cable netting, which she tested it with her weight. Then she threw some heavy stones on top to test the floor further, but it didn't move, it didn't even creak.

 _:It's not going anywhere,:_ she thought, pleased with herself and her own cleverness.

She went to get the steel-glass panels she would need. She held two of them together and magic-melded them into one thick panel, then melded a third on just to be safe. She still had plenty of them left over. The three-inch-thick steel-glass panel was then laid it out on the steel cable floor webbing and tested for weight, but it seemed everything was in order. Merrill started melding panels togeher and covering the steel-web floor with large glass panels cut to fit. When the hole was completely covered, she grouted in between the panes with the very last of the steel-skin solution, just barely having enough to finish with.

 _:Well... that's certainly neat,:_ she thought, surveying her work. _:Odd, but neat.:_

The room had looked airy before with the large floor to ceiling window-doors along one side, it looked like it was floating now that most of the floor was made of what looked like glass. Merrill walked out into the center of it and looked down at her feet, marveling at being able to see an entire room beneath her. The library, while still dusty and dinghy certainly benefited from an unusual amount of sunlight filtering down into it.

She wondered what the next tenants of the house, if there were any, would think of the change. Merrill was pretty sure that there were no other houses that had glass floors. Maybe she should get rid of the steel-skin patch over the ceiling and replace it with glass and the whole place could be filled with light.

_:I don't think I'll make anymore work for myself than I already have thanks. If Fenris wasn't a glass room, he can just make it himself.:_

It had been a long day and Merrill was sore and felt utterly exhausted. She really couldn't recall the last time she'd put in so much actual labor on something!

 _:But the whole upstairs is washed down, now!:_ she congratulated herself in amazement and cheer. _:All I have left is... the whole downstairs. And the garden. And the laundry, if I can get to it..._

The down stairs consisted of what had once been all of the larger, more public rooms in the Hightown mansion. There was a library, which only glimpsed in passing, another study, a long room with an equally long table just for eating in, three more large rooms that she'd been unable to determine the use of. The main open area with the stairs and the glass ceiling she'd just replaced seemed to double as a place in which large gatherings were held.

:What would any one person need with so many rooms?!: Merrill wondered to herself. :It just seems silly!:

Plus, there were also the servants quarters, the kitchens, the washing rooms and pantries in the back corner of the house where the _real_ work of feeding the family that lived there and keeping clean all of their silly little treasures took place. The whole weird system just made her head hurt. She couldn't fathom it.

 _:You could hide three Dalish Clans in this place and they'd never find one another!:_ she reconsidered. _:Well, maybe not **three** of them, but still, this place is ridiculous. Whatever would anyone need with all of these rooms. Fenris took it over and he only uses one of them!:_

By the close of the day she'd cleaned all of the upstairs except for the one room that Fenris had claimed for his own. Merrill had sense enough to know that if she went intruding there, Fenris and his touchy sense of privacy were likely to turn and growl at her, so she left it well alone... Except for gathering up his bed linens... she couldn't pass them by and leave them from going who knew how long without washing.

As a finishing touch just so that she could say she'd done her work thoroughly, Merrill went to each room of the house and gathered up the loose and broken stone tiles from the floors. She cast a very clever variation on the stonefist spell and the stone tiles floated up and circled lazily around her while she mentally sorted them. Then, like Varric dealing from his card deck, Merrill flicked the tiles outward, settling each one of them in the places she'd designated for them. She sealed the stone tiles to the floors then stonefist-poured on grout to seal the cracks between and washed out the excess. Just like that, the floors were restored!

 _:There! That's done it!_ : she congratulated herself proudly, then wearily went back to the room she'd staked out for herself and ladled herself out another bowl of soup. Merrill ate tiredly, exhaustion from her work suppressing an appetite that would otherwise have been ravenous. She tried to think optimistically that most of the lower rooms in the abandoned mansion had already been cleaned out. She wasn't really sure what she should do with the corpses that continued to rot in the front hallway.

 _:Maybe just mummify them so they're still scary but they won't continue to stink,:_ she thought sleepily as she curled up and dropped deeply into sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

She woke late the next morning and lay curled up for a little while, still sleepy, then dragged herself out of bed. Upon rising she realized that she'd eaten the last of her food the night before and would need to go shopping.

"A change is as good as a rest, or so my Keeper tells me," she told herself aloud to reinforce the opinion that she wasn't certain she shared as she grabbed up a basket and headed out to the nearest market for some supplies.

There were really two markets in Hightown; one was more a collection of fine shops that sold silks and jewels and fancy things to appeal to the nobles that lived in Hightown, the other was a market full of more common things like foodstuffs and soaps and various tools and hardware for those who were supposed to take care of the nobles. Merrill was sensible enough to have learned that this second shop was the one she was supposed to go to (that, and the elves of the Alienage had told her so, many of them had cousins who worked in them or were servants in noble houses and thus they shopped there).

The common market didn't have fancy shops; it had stalls, which was more familiar to her since it was closer to the market in lowtown. There was a stall run by a butcher's apprentice that sold the "extra" parts of an animal that wasn't desirable for the higher classes to eat; things like the innards and heart and liver for a lesser price than the finer cuts. One stall sold salves, poultices and common medicines as well as some common herbs, mostly for cooking. There was a stall selling fish freshly caught on that mornings tide, and a stall that sold day-old bread from the bakers shop as well as flour that would almost definitely be mixed with something else to make it seem like there was more than there was. Business in this market didn't involve leisurely browsing; all of the people who went there were looking for specific items and would haggle sharply to make the most out of every coin. Haggling was still a strange idea to Merrill; in her clan, needed goods were held in common and it was a Keepers responsibility to make certain there was enough for all. Arguing over how much a needed thing should cost seemed strange to her.

_:Still, I think I've gotten better. Varric doesn't wince every time we go to the market anymore at least...:_ she thougt trying to calm her slight trepidation at the thought of even the friendly confrontation involved with buying goods from a market.

She was going to need enough to feed herself for the rest of the week, and she already knew Fenris' place had one of those rooms that shemlen used especially for cooking food called "kitchens" hidden somewhere in it, so she'd be better off buying raw goods rather than things that had already been cooked since she could cook for herself easily enough. Merrill browsed a bit, looking over the selection.

She bought a number of sundries she knew she would need off hand like flour, eggs, butter, cheese, cooking oil, and vinegar, then started looking at ingredients to make meals in particular. The first things she bought were for soup; a waxed-paper box of hearts, livers, bits of meat and fat and some bones for soup stock. Next were a pair of live pigeons from an enterprising young elven boy she knew from the Alienage. At his recommendation (and aid) she bought a box of various "undesirable" vegetables, then some elfroot and other herbal seeds from another vendor. She spent probably more than Varric, or even Fenris might have, but she did manage to talk them down just a little bit, so Merrill was rather proud of herself.

Upon arrival back at Fenris' now slightly less-decrepit mansion, Merrill let herself into the kitchen to survey the area. Even to her inexperienced Dalish sensibilities, the kitchen was flat-out _disgusting_. Merrill didn't have any experience with buildings in general, but a Keepers aravell was where all the preparations for medicine took place (though food was usually still cooked over the fire) and Marethari was somewhat fanatical about cleanliness where that was concerned. If Merrill likened the kitchen to a place where she might prepare medicines, she certainly would not have trusted any remedy emerging from said area.

_:And as for actually eating from out of this place,:_ Merrill thought looking around her. _:As it is, it is quite out of the question!:_

The counters, walls, and ceiling were caked in a sticky film of oil residue everywhere mixed with the dust from neglect and the leavings of various pests that had occupied the room over time. The floors were not something even _she_ would walk upon barefooted. There were pests skittering about. All in all, if she wanted breakfast (or any meal for that matter) this place needed to be cleaned first.

_:Ew, even the ceilings are filthy!:_ she thought with a shudder.

She pulled water directly into the deep sinks (probably meant either for laundry or those enormous cook pots hanging on the wall... or both) and scrubbed the sinks clean with a stiff brush and the harshest lye soap she had, adding a spell to pull off... whatever film it was that had accumulated on the surface and wasn't letting go. With the sinks clean she pulled water out of the tap and heated it directly with a spell until it was nearly boiling. Even her magic was going to need all of the help it could get to clean that sticky film off!

She shot a spiraling stream of soapy water extra hard at the ceilings, pummeling the grime with brute force and managing to remove several layers. She pushed the hot, bespelled soapy water back and forth so that the dirt-attraction spells could pull the horrible whatever-it-was off from the surface. Merrill was accustomed to chain-casting powerful elemental magics with the aid of blood magic, so lesser spells such as those were ones she could keep using for a while (if she was well rested) without barely even feeling the strain. She levitated a small bevy of brushes and attacked the ceiling with them, raining down soapy suds onto the floor along with the wash water.

_:Wow, they were once white at one point!:_ she marveled as her third scrubbing got rid of the last of the disgusting film of oil and dirt caked onto the ceiling.

To her amazement the kitchen still had most of its utensils in it, though Fenris seemed to have taken it upon himself to decorate it with more empty wine bottles than she thought was healthy for his liver. There was a path cleared through the clutter to a little trapdoor in the floor that Merrill could only presume led straight to where the wine was kept.

_:I'm almost afraid to go down into that cellar to discover that Fenris is in fact an alcoholic...:_ Merrill thought in amusement.

She pulled down all of the pots and pans that had been hung on the walls and ceiling racks, and went through the utterly filthy rodent-homes calling themselves cupboards to remove the mixing bowls, plates, and glassware. She even, very reluctantly, emptied the drawers of knives, silverware and other cooking implements. Merrill stacked all of the gear she'd found in the kitchen in neat piles outside of the door, leaving the room itself bare and ready to be cleaned.

"Oh!" she screamed as pests and critters scampered away this way and that at her approach. "That is certainly _not_ going to stand!"

She hadn't called upon it very often, but there was a slightly acceptable blood magic spell that took hold of the minds of lesser creatures (en masse, if they were small enough) for a time. Her very next task after clearing out the kitchen, was to evict the current residents! Merrill spread her will outward, pulling on the consciousness of every single last rat, mouse, squirrel and... there was even a raccoon the size of a small dog holding court in the pantry!

"Out you get!" she ordered them, force-marching all of them out of the house and leaving behind an aversion mind-hex in their minds that would make them all avoid the house thereafter.

She wielded her broom like a cross between a staff and a cudgel, sweeping it before her to encourage the wildlife to get a move on. The rats and rodents squeaked and hissed at her, but had no choice but to obey... but they didn't like it.

"And you as well, you little pests, there's a perfectly fine garden outside that door that's more than good enough for you!" she shouted at the bugs she could sense scurrying through the woodwork.

Getting rid of all of the bugs was much easier. She cast a spell that vibrated the air at a particular frequency, creating a noise and vibration that insects simply could not withstand. The Dalish used the spell for clearing out ruins when they wished to inhabit them for a time, it was very effective. In a bare few heartbeats there came skittering noises from within all of the walls. The floor, walls and countertops were quickly covered in a moving carpet of household pests as every last insect in all of the house cleared out, scrambling to get away form the noise. Merrill expanded her range all the way up through the second floor and out past the bounds of the garden, chasing away every last insect and pushing her magic out to fill in all of the holes in the walls and floors that their homes had made as well.

_:I shall certainly set up wards after this, no point in letting them come back!:_ she thought trying to suppress full-body shudders at the thought of what her friend must have been sharing his living space with for all of this time.

There were rats in the Alienage, naturally, but they were clean, friendly rats. Most of them were descendants of rats who'd lived in the Gallows, and were steeped in ambient magic, making them strangely companionable. She didn't mind leaving out the occasional bit of cheese outside of her pantry wards in exchange for their clever rodent companionship every now and again. The rats infesting Fenris' place however, while they too had their share of magic, were in general all sly, mean, nasty, uncooperative, greedy, and not inclined to accept reasonable boundaries. So Merrill had no qualms whatsoever about sending them on their way.

Pests gotten rid of, Merrill drew and heated another deep sink full of water with mage-soap in it and proceeded to wash down the walls and the attached cabinets with the same determined efficiency with which she'd washed down the ceiling. It went easier because for some reason whoever had laid out the kitchen had decided to put smooth, easily cleanable tile on the walls, but not the ceilings. The cabinets however...

_:I think those rats were using it for a waste disposal site!:_ Merrill thought in disgust.

Forget washing with just hot water, she was _boiling_ the water!

_:And what's this here?:_ Merrill wondered to herself as she spied a tall, two-sectioned floor to ceiling cabinet off to one side.

Curious, she pulled open the doors, which had become lodged shut somehow, and immediately wished she hadn't gotten so curious. A putrid, noxious smell hit her like a brick and she went reeling back as the contents of her stomach rushed up into her throat. She just made it to the sink before she retched and coughed helplessly, loosing her breakfast. She was barely able to stop gagging long enough to incinerate the entire contents of the cabinet almost by reflex. She cast a wind spell and opened the nearest window, casting wind until the smell (the awful _awful_ _smell_!) at last dissipated. Merrill brushed tears from her eyes as she was once again able to stand without doubling over and being sick.

"Creators on a halla!" she managed to exclaim to herself. "Curiosity nearly killed me!"

There was a small trace of the smell still lingering, but Merrill was already spraying boiling hot, soap-laden water at the interior of the cabinet with a force behind it that would have knocked over a large dog. If there had been any trace of the cabinets contents that had made it through her incineration, they were surely gone by then! Once she was certain that she had the nasty thing absolutely clean, Merrill took a closer look at it and found that she recognized what it was supposed to be.

The Dalish moved around a lot, but they generally had places where they wintered over, places where they stored up food they harvested from the wilds to get though the lean months. Any Dalish Keeper worth their Clan knew preservation magics like they knew their vallasliin. Merrill immediately recognized the spells placed on the cabinets; cold spells, and preservation magics that slowed down entropy and decay. It was a place meant to store food!

_:The spells must have worn off after the original tenants left, but before whoever came to inhabit it next arrived.:_

Because otherwise, the next person would have eaten all of the food inside.

_:I suppose it would be too much to expect them to clean up the mess!:_ Merrill thought.

Instead, they'd just sealed up the door and let it get worse!

_:Well, I guess now that it's clean, I'll have a place to keep the fish so they don't go bad,:_ she thought as Merrill deftly restored the preservation and the cold spells, with a few Dalish improvements on them.

She turned her attention to the rest of the cabinets. Three washes and scrubbings later, the bristles of the brushes were starting to take off wood shavings and Merrill was willing to be satisfied that the area was at last safe to use. The countertops were all shiny sealed stone, which was much easier for her to feel confident about getting clean.

_:Now... let's have a look at this thing!:_ Merrill thought with a small feeling of excitement.

There was a device in the corner of the kitchen that all the elves in the Alienage had remarked upon with excitement when she'd asked them about it. The servants of those shem who had one all bragged about them to the servants of those whose shem did not have one, the remarkable thing known as a "stove." Apparently it was supposed to make controlling the temperature of a heating fire, and thus cooking things, much, much easier. Merrill was eaten alive with curiosity about it. As a Dalish she had only ever cooked over a fire or in a hearth, which could often be chancy even if one was practiced at the craft. The miraculous device supposedly got rid of a great deal of the difficulties with an open flame hearth and Merrill was rather eager to try it out for herself.

_:But not without a thorough cleaning first!_ :

Ash was pulled out from the pot-bellied iron oven in the bottom, and the entirety of it was hosed down and scrubbed (mostly because of the possibility of rodent leavings and dead things). The stove pipe was cleared out of the birds nests that had settled in it and when she looked into the pot-bellied bottom of it, Merrill discovered another unexpected surprise.

_:You can tell this place once belonged to mage...:_ Merrill thought dryly.

Instead of using common fire and wood like any other oven and stove might have, this one was equipped with an emberstone nestled into the bottom and until now, covered with ashes from the fires that had been built on top of it by people who did not know what it was. Emberstones were magically costly to create, and required regular recharging, but they were superior to common fires in that their temperatures could be adjusted to the minutest degrees and there was no chance of them getting out of hand.

_:It seems that after the previous tenant left and the emberstone lost its magic. The people who squatted in here afterwards must have started using wood like a normal stove,:_ she mused as she cleaned off the emberstone and quickly recharged it with her magic and set it back in its little holder in the oven.

The kitchen was even bigger than she'd originally thought. It anchored one of the back corners of the house so it had windows on two of the walls that faced the outside. The long outside wall looked out onto the tiny kitchen garden, and the shorter wall at the narrow end looked out to the back courtyard garden proper. The long inside wall held the entrance near the leftmost corner of the room with the preservation pantry directly on the right, which was how Merrill had missed it the first time. There was another door on the other side of the preservation pantry that led to a tiny servants hallway that had a door leading small pantry and storage closet on one side and to the twinned servants quarters on the other. The center of the kitchen was taken up with a large island topped by a polished granite slab that served as both kitchen table and food preparation area. The narrow inside wall to the left of the entrance was a bank of long, glistening stone countertops with the stove holding pride of place directly in the center. The long bank of countertops on the long outside wall opposite the entry held the kitchen sink in them. A set of deep, wide laundry sinks occupied the narrow outside wall, and anchoring the outermost corner of the kitchen was a large, stone, curiously round hearth covered in strange carvings.

"I might as well do the hearth too," Merrill said.

As well as having a stove, a pair of dish-washing sinks, miles of countertops, three pantries and two deep laundry tubs in a small alcove to one side, the enormous kitchen also boasted a little hearth built into the outside wall. Merrill hadn't given it much thought except to clean it, but now that she looked at it more closely... the hearth was rather odd. There were magical sigils, ones for a Tevinter-style spirit-binding if she wasn't mistaken. It was also surrounded with all _manner_ of wards, a complicated and complex net of them, clearly written by a master mage. It made her immediately suspicious.

_:Fenris must have been safe from whatever is in those wards because, to judge by the looks of things, he's never touched a toe in this kitchen, but I can tell just by looking at them that this spell is some serious business!:_ She thought to herself as she crept cautiously closer to examine them more carefully.

Merrill had become accustomed, over time, to the complexity of the spellwebs within the Eluvian, and so whenever she came across any complex magic that was not elven, she compared it immediately and unfavorably. The network of spells housed within the hearth however were... approaching something comparable to a spellweb. There were a lot of spells, wards mostly, layered within the stone, and all of them as intricately interlocked as the gears of a dwarven timepiece.

:These wards...: Merrill thought uneasily once she'd gotten a sense of them. :They're inactive, but boy... if they were active, they'd be some of the natiest peices of work I've ever come across!:

She'd heard tales (mostly from Fenris) about how vindictively inventive a magister could get when he had a mind to punish someone, and the layers of wards in the spell on the hearth were certainly set up with some _really_ vicious spells. In fact they were so nasty that Merrill could not in good conscience leave them lying about, even inactive, for someone to possibly accidentally trigger at a later date and get incinerated, turned inside out or transformed into a slug (and those were the mild ones!). For safety's sake, she was going to have to deactivate them, and it was exceedingly clear to her that the wards had been designed to resist being tampered with.

"Hmph!" Merrill scoffed, looking at it with a glint of both interest and determination in her mind.

She had spent a decade poking, prodding picking apart and figuring out ancient elven spell-webs. If some Tevinter Magister thought he was going to defeat _her_ with his crude adaptations of the real thing, that magister was sorely mistaken! Merrill didn't dive in and attack, oh no, she toned her magic down to the gentlest of whispers; weaving, wending, insinuating her threads of magic though all of the little holes in that magisters crude tapestries.

_:There's more here than just a hearthstone!:_ Merrill realized immediately.

It was a keystone, one that fed a large network of interwoven wards. It took a few moments of weeding through the various protections on the outer layer of the wards for her to figure out where the wards were attached to and the answer quite surprised her. The wards connected to the hearthstone spread out all over the mansion itself! It was a network meant to keep the premises secure from interlopers in the absence of the master, but the network itself seemed to have been taken offline. The wards were, thankfully, inert, and the defensive wards on the house had been in a quiescent state for years!

_:I do wonder if it's a good thing, or a bad thing that Fenris never knew about this,:_ Merrill thought.

On the one hand he might have enjoyed the luxury of a security system in place to warn him of intruders, but on the other hand... Fenris did not like magic much. Merrill mentally shrugged as she wove her way through the wards layer by layer, puzzle by puzzle, like a careful locksmith picking a lock. She nudged here and tweaked there, unlocking each little point and infusing it with her magic, claiming it for herself, before moving on. At last she reached the center, but instead of a core of magical commands, Merrill was shocked to discover a _presence_ there! There was some poor little Spirit trapped under all of those wards!

_:Oh, you poor dear!:_ Merrill thought in pity and dismay. _:Trapped here alone for all of this time. Don't worry, I'll get you out.:_

The little thing must worn itself to exhaustion trying to escape when the original owner had been killed and had decided to settle itself into a sleep, perhaps gathering its strength or simply waiting to be freed. Merrill gently, gently nudged the delicate spiderweb of ward-spells and binds on the heart of the stone and claimed the last of the wards for herself. The instant she did, however, magic flowed into her with a strange, buzzing zap and a new connection opened up. She could _sense_ the interior wards around the house, it was sort of like being able to hear distant noises. She was _aware_ of each room, every door and window, she could even sense the places that she'd just replaced, like parts that didn't belong. Then she snapped back into herself like a person waking up from a sleep.

The stone at the hearth glowed brilliant red, then orange, yellow and green in brilliant flashing colors.

"Haaaaaah!" a strange voice shouted, emanating from the stone.

The hearth blazed to life in a blinding flash and a powerful soundless explosion that rocked her back on her heels. Flames rushed up through the chimney and flared out in a burst to cover the whole little hearth then it slowly shrank down.

"Who has summoned me from my slumber?" the flames demanded.

The funny thing was that, rather than sounding intimidating and awe-inspiring, like a powerful Spirit might, the voice from within the flames was actually sort of... tiny. Tiny and cute, with an accent that sounded more like a provender of day-old fish rather than a terrifying soul-eating demon.

"Oh, hullo there," Merrill said, tempted to poke at the little fire.

The fire in the hearthstone looked at her with big, round limpid pools of magic for eyes. Like a puppy. A flaming magical puppy made of fire.

"Lo, mortal, for thou hast bested the magic of the hearth and thus" the flames coughed and hacked for a long moment. "Sorry, soot in my throat y'know."

"That's quite alright," Merrill said, looking at the little puppy-face of flames with some fascination.

It had to be a Spirit of some sort. A spirit that had been bound to tend the wards of this place... how _very_ Tevinter.

"Well I guess there's no point in trying to sound all formal since you don't look like you're the sort to be afraid of a little fire," the little hearthflame said, glowing a welcoming gold color. "So...er, ah... yeah. You beat it, y'know? The spell, that is."

"What spell?" Merrill asked cluelessly.

"The master-spell, the one that controls this hearth and the whole house besides. Yer my new mistress, y'know?"

"Oh," Merrill said, a bit dismayed. "Have you been here this whole time, Ser Fire?"

"When the last master got killed in a fight, I shut down, waiting for the next master with the Master Key to show up," The flame spirit said conversationally. 

Merrill could somehow sense the capital letters on the words Master Key, getting a feeling of far greater importance than just the little bit of metal that unlocked the front door.

"When no-one showed up to claim the Wards, I thought I'd try to bust outta this joint, but it turns out that the spell binding me ta this hearth is just too strong. So I went to sleep, hoping it would decay over time. Then you woke me up and now, since you're keyed in to all the wards, that makes you the new mistress of the manse."

Merrill's brow furrowed in puzzlement, not entirely believing what she was hearing. Oblivious to her consternation, the little ward-spirit went on.

"The Master Key is in the safe-box, you can pick up any time. Ya just take that down to the city residency office and they'll have you sign all of the papers, officially transferring ownership of one mage-mansion in Hightown, to you."

"Oh," Merrill said faintly. "Oh dear."

"You don't look happy. Well, not that I can blame you, this place has really gone down the crapper it looks like. Sheesh, lookit this mess y'know?"

"I just cleaned," Merrill said a bit morosely.

"An' a lovely job ya done too," The flames said, a little too brightly as the flickered over to a warm yellow-white color... Merrill got the feeling that it had said that just to lift her spirits and not because it actually found the place to have been kept in good repair.

"The problem, mister fire, is that this house is where _Fenris_ lives."

"He ain't part o' the wards, so he ain't the master o' this place," the flames said bluntly, flaring up a bit.

"He's been living here the last decade it seems you've been asleep and I just... well... invited myself in to clean the place up while he's gone. I only claimed the wards in the hearthstone on order to deactivate them so no-one would get hurt by accident. I'm not... I'm not exactly his most favorite person in all the world."

"So kick him out," the flames said uncaringly, turning greeny-yellow. "You hold the wards to the house, you can lock him from entering if you want to. Just say the word missus and I'll bar every door and window in the whole place by your command."

"I couldn't do that, he has no-where else to live!" Merrill protested. "And he's my friend. Well, I _think_ he's my friend. I'm cleaning his house to express my gratitude to him, and maybe, just maybe finally get him to like me for myself, just a little bit."

"Well if he's gonna live here now that _I'm_ up and at 'em, he's gotta be keyed into the wards, otherwise he can only stay as a guest," the flames said, sounding ever so slightly like a punctilious senechal with riffraff on the front step.

"Wouldn't you rather be freed instead?" Merrill asked it. "I'm sure I could do that now, if you wanted to go back to... wherever it is you came from."

The flames turned red and flared up in alarm.

"Nonono!" it said quickly. "If its all the same ta you, I'd really rather just stay here. Here is great! it's warm, I have my own little bed, plus, once you get the kitchen staff back, there's all the delicious things I could eat! It's a good life, y'know, fer a Spirit."

Merrill kept her thoughts to herself, but it sounded to her like the little hearth-flame spirit didn't want to be let loose to return where it came from because it might be in some sort of trouble. Still, it wasn't really her place to argue with him, if he wanted to stick to his hearthstone, that was none of her nevermind.

"Well if you're sure," she said.

"I am," the fire said quickly.

"Well that's fine then. I was just about to make myself some breakfast on that new iron dwarven stove contraption," Merrill said.

"Oh _that_ ," the flames said flatly, glowing bright green. "I don't see what the big deal is. It's just because its new and expensive that everyone thinks its so wonderful."

The little spirit sounded jealous of the stove for some reason. Merrill's smile turned a bit sly.

"Oh, then I suppose you won't mind if I cook breakfast over _you_ , then?"

The flames glowed purple, that the fire-spirit flared at her with obvious affront.

"I am NOT a cookfire, sister!" he said, affronted. "I'll have you know that I control every last ward in this house, right down the the sweeping wards to keep dust off the floors... which are in bad need a repair by the way. This place is a sty! Doesn't he ever clean, this Fenris of yours?"

"No," Merrill replied bluntly, finishing unpacking the market-basket and distributing the things she'd bought in the different pantries and cupboards. Eggs and milk and butter in the cold preservation pantry, salt and flour and honey in the dry pantry, spices in the spice cupboard.

Next she looked at the range on top of the oven. There were four indentations on the top surface that were covered over with metal cages and inside those indentations were nestled four flat magical... rocks maybe?

"Here, allow me," the hearth-spirit said.

The four stones at the top clicked a little bit, and then with a tiny whooshing sound lit up with bright blue flames that lowered down to small, regular hot blue flames that burned with a steady, even heat. They were, in short, perfect for cooking on.

"For cooking with, without needing a full fire with wood and mess!" she exclaimed. "That's very clever!"

"I suppose," the hearth said, glowing green again. "If you like that sort of thing. I can flame much hotter than they can of course."

"That's not necessarily a good thing, if you're looking to cook with it," Merrill pointed out. "I think I want one of these stove-things, just think of all of the potions I could make! It would be so much easier than all the bother I have with trying to make one over the hearth in my home. Well, what _was_ my home."

"You don't have to worry about it anymore," the hearthfire insisted. "Ya got me now!"

Potions were sensitive, demanding, persnikety things that never liked to do anything right unless precise conditions were met. Being able to control the temperature to such a degree would cut the chance of something not working right in half, easily. Maybe she would ask Fenris about using his kitchen...

_:I can't imagine that's going to go well!:_ Merrill thought with amusement.

She could hear the reaction now without even having to ask...

_:"You wish to practice your foul magics in the place where I sleep?!":_ she mimicked his offense in her mind.

Well, yes, she did.

_:Perhaps with all of the coin he wastes on the terrible food from roadside vendors... it could be possible that he can be bribed with food,_ : she plotted.

Merrill located a large copper pot, several mixing bowls, bread-pans and a few other things from the pile she'd made outside of the room and dumped them in a sink filled with soapy water near to boiling. She washed them and began the preparations for bread and soup. While the dough rose she occupied herself with washing some of the rest of the dishes.

_:Now these, at least, are understandable,:_ Merrill thought, eyeing the stacks of cooking implements.

There were more there than her clan used, but even among her clan, cooking utensils probably took up the most space in an aravell. Even if it was over the hearth, her people liked good food, and certain traditional recipes required certain special tools to cook them.

"Is there bacon?" the hearth asked, hopefully. "I love bacon!"

"I'll be sure to pick up a rasher next time I'm at market," Merrill promised. "For now I've soup to set on for the afternoon and evening. I hope you don't mind if I leave that in your capable... er, hands. I have a lot of work left to do today and I can't take time away to keep an eye on things."

"You can leave it ta me, herr comandant!" the fire said emphatically.

The dough rose and she put little round dough balls on the flat sheet in the oven and started on the soup. The butcher sold little waxpaper bags of meat for stews at a discount; they were usually the tough cuts, some organ meat, and the less desirable bits from a variety of animals, but they always sold well to the less well-off citizens. Bruised vegetables could also be bought fairly cheaply and once the bruises were removed they tasted fine in soup. Merrill grew her own seasoning herbs.

:In fact, I'll find a spare planter around this place and start up a little garden for the kitchen!: she thought absently. :You can't have too many seasonings around for food.:

For her late breakfast, Merrill fried up the fish in oil with fresh seasonings, broke open a warm roll directly from the oven and spread it with butter and honey, and made a small pot of tea from a copper kettle she'd rescued. She'd located a few stools that hadn't been broken up for kindling and she ate at the shiny kitchen counter.

"Here, have a roll!" Merrill said, tossing one over to the hearthfire the way a person might toss a dog a treat.

"Y'know, I like you missus," the fire said happily making the roll disappear somehow without burning it. "You're already worlds better than my last master. He never gave me even the ashes from his logs unless I'd done more for him than any other Spirit could do in a week."

"Oh? Like what things?" Merrill asked curiously.

"Well I got contacts, y'know? Spirits is plenty curious about things if you know the right ones ta go to. An' we're all usually pretty old too. We _keep_ things, even if we don't always understand them. So I go hunting through those that _know_ things, and see if I can't find out something that might be close to what he's looking for."

Merrill's eye widened and she regarded the hearthfire with a mouth full of fish.

"Oh... you are a treasure!" she breathed.

She wanted nothing more than to grab a notebook and start asking questions, but her sense of responsibility nagged at her with a task left undone, so she decided that if the hearthfire had waited for this long, he could wait just a little longer.

"You could hire some servants, like the last master did," the hearthfire pointed out. "I wouldn't try to leave everything up to Poncy, he's good at small tasks, but don't go asking him for anything too complicated."

"Poncy?" Merrill asked, broguht up short. "Who's Poncy?"

"Oh... you didn't clear out those corpses in the hallway, so I guess you wouldn't have met him. I'll call him up for ya."

Merrill felt a sinking feeling of dismay. Sure enough in a short moment there came a regular rusty clanking sound, as of someone walking, or rather, shambling about, in armor. Poking its large helmeted head through the kitchen doorway was a tall, broad suit of armor that, by all appearances could walk on its own.

"Oh...Oh, my..." Merrill said, feeling faint all over again. "Is it... dead?"

She might be a bloodmage, but even _she_ drew the line at walking corpses!

"Not atall mum," the suit of armor replied in a proper, dignified, though very hollow-sounding tone.

The accent rather reminded her of a character of a butler in a play she'd once went to see with Varric and Hawke once. So dignified and upright and cultured-sounding. He sounded nothing like Hawke's former servant Bodhan.

"I am Ser Pontius Tiberius Clemantius Benedictus Kumberbottom... The Third."

Merrill blinked.

"At you service, mum," the shambling suit of armor gave a squeaky, rusty bow to her, perfectly correct and straightened looking at her expectantly.

Just when she'd thought things couldn't get any stranger.

"Oh. Um. Merrill. Just Merrill. I used to be Merrill Sabrae but... well nevermind. It's a pleasure to meet you. Have you been hiding here all this time as well?"

"Poncy here's been blended in with those corpses yer creepy friend just left rotting in the hallway," the hearthfire interjected.

"Pontius," the armor corrected in pained, dignified tones. "My name is Pontius Tiberius--,"

"Yeah yeah yeah, Poncy, fer short," the hearthfire teased. "And since we're making introductions, I guess I forgot to tell you what you can call me, missus."

"Oh? Flamey? Burney? How about Flicker?" Merrill teased the little hearthfire just so he would know what it felt like to have his own name decided for him.

"I go by Lucien Luminatus Blaze," he said, flaring up dramatically upon announcing his name. "Pretty hot huh?"

"Very impressive," Merrill said, trying to sound suitably impressed. "But would you be a dear then and heat up the soup a bit more? I've worked hard and I think I'd like a nice hot bowl full."

"You got it Missie!" Blaze said cheerfully, flaring up tiny flames under the soup pot that had been simmering all day.

Without any prompting the suit of armor, butler-like, pulled out a tray and loaded it with a bowl and utensils and clanked heavily over to the stove. While he was ladling out the soup for her meal, Merrill covertly whispered over to the Blaze.

"He's not really a walking corpse, is he?"

"No worries there," Blaze whispered back. "The old master didn't like the stink of dead things. Even mummies have a particular little something to 'em, so he enchanted the suit of armor itself to move, kinda like a puppet on marionette strings. It's just a suit of armor."

Merrill inwardly sighed with relief. She hadn't wanted to rudely send Pontius away when he'd been so nice, but walking corpses really gave her the creeps.

While her soup began to simmer, Merrill filled more barrels from the sink and rolled them all out to the different rooms on the main floor. She came back just in time to rescue her bread before it burned and checked the simmering soup pot. Of his own volition, by now Merrill had to assume that the walking suit of armor had volition, Pontius etcetera-and-so-forth had gathered up all of the dishes that Merrill had stacked outside of the room and was washing them in the sink that she'd left half full of hot water. Merrill hurriedly thanked him for seeing to the task, feeling abashed at having it done for her.

"It is my pleasure to help mum," the armor assured her.

:Next task... everything else!: she thought fortifying herself for the job to come.

Merrill walked through all of the downstairs rooms, pulling down all of the hangings, curtains and tapestries on all of the walls to add to them to Laundry Mountain. Pontius followed right behind her as she pulled down the hangings, picking them up off the floors, shaking htem out, and when the piles in his arms grew large, he walked all of them into the atrium with teh skylights and deposited them into Laundry Mountain. The laundry would certainly be an all-day task in and of itself. n fact it might require the recruitment of a few of the laundry-maids who took in washing down in the alienage. She had washing tubs and soap, but she had no lines to hang the laundry to dry on.

"Ser Pontius?" Merrill said a bit diffidently to the enormous walking golem-like suit of armor. "Do you enjoy this? I mean, I could unbind you from that suit and send you back across the Veil to join the other Spirits if you wanted. You don't have to maunder about here helping me if you'd rather not."

"Yes, mum," he said. "My sort does not have preferences as you would understand them, but helpfulness is something I enjoy so much as I understand the word enjoyment. I would rather be doing it than not."

"Why is it you talk the way you do? You sound so... butler-like? Like a caricature in a play," she asked, then amended hastily, in case she'd hurt his feelings. "Not that I'm criticising."

"The one who called me preffered it that way, mum, and I saw no reason not to adapt to suit his preferences."

"Oh. Wouldn't you rather sound more like yourself?"

"I do," the butler-golem-spirit replied.

"Oh, alright then," Merrill shrugged, deciding to leave the whole confusing matter alone.

After all, she rather liked having the company about, and besides, far be it from her to just start banishing the residents that had lived here from before Fenris had showed up.

"Thank you for all of your help anyway," she said.

"I note, mum, that when you cleaned the upper rooms yesterday, you first moved barrels of water to all of the doorways. Am I correct to assume that you plan to do much the same thing today?"

"Yes," Merrill sighed a bit to herself.

Moving those heavy things was possible with either physical strength or magic, but neither way was easy.

"Then please allow me to assist you by performing that task, as it is certainly within my means."

"Oh!" Merrill brightened with surprise and delight. "That would certainly be a help, thank you!"

"I am glad to be of service," Pontius replied.

The big armored butler went to the kitchen and started to draw up barrel after barrel of hot water, which he carried carefully to the doorways to each room, while Merrill enjoyed a little rest in between tasks and a nice snack.

_:First things first,_ : she reminded herself, looking around her. _:There's all the rest of the rooms left to clean up with, though Creators know what Fenris is going to do with that big, long dining room when he has only himself to eat with!:_

Merrill tried to imagine him throwing a party, but her mind failed at it. Fenris could be social when the mood struck him, but it was usually only in small doses, with limited numbers of people, and even then, mostly only with one person at a time. The idea of him actually opening his home to let people in past his defenses was a foreign one even now that he no longer had bounty hunters and his former master to worry about.

She popped a lyrium potion and then just went room to room; heating, soaping, spraying down the walls ceilings and floors, levitating the scrub brushes to fly across the surfaces in a most amusing fashion (and one that took a lot of fine control). She manipulated the water to attract and gather up all of the loosened dirt down off the walls into the center of the room and steamed the water away, leaving only a large pile of dirt, soot ash and dusted detritus in the center of each room that could be swept away.

It seemed that the large number of tapestries, portraits and other hangings had saved the walls from collecting dirt the way the ones upstairs had, so the task was a bit easier this time. Either that, or Merrill had gotten used to the routine of cleansing and had simply become more efficient at it for she was done with cleaning all of the rooms except for the library and the central skylighted room with the stairs by early afternoon.

Merrill went back into the kitchen to consult with the spirit of the hearthstone about renewing all of the decayed and deadened maintenance and warding spells all over the house. She'd left them alone to concentrate on the purely physical cleaning of all of the dust and cobwebs and dirt that had stuck all over everything that hadn't been cleaned in a decade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A funny word about Lucien and Pontius Tiberius etcetera and so on... They were not originally written into this fic. I had put this on AO3 as a draft and had spent an entire freaking day editing it and had been about to post it up... but I was tired and thought "I'll do it in the morning..." but when I woke up I had the thought; "Hey, you know what this fic actually reminds me of? Howl's Moving Castle!" I'm a bit of a Miyazaki nut. Okay, not just a bit; I and my sister hunt and watch Miyazaki movies, I think I've come close to seeing all of them. Anyway, HMC is up there among my favorites of them all, I think that scene where Sophie is cleaning Howl's house is just the most wonderful thing! Where she's chasing the bugs with a broom? Hilarious!! Anyway, once my mind had made the comparison... how could I not make my own little version of Calicifer and the little pogostick-scarecrow-prince-in-disguise? I hope you all enjoy them and... well, there's more to come.


	4. Chapter 4

"Lucien?" she called from the threshold of the kitchen.

The fading light of sunset turned a dim gold slanting through the windows, reminding her of the long day she had spent cleaning all of the rooms on the main floor.

"What kin I do ya fer, missus?" the little hearth-spirit asked cheerfully.

"It's about all of those wards and the other spells that have degraded and wasted away over time," she said a bit tentatively.

"Yeah, I was meaning ta ask you if you wouldn't mind going through and restoring them for me," the flame said. "They're sort of my eyes and ears around the house. Poncy is the muscle for the most part, but I monitor the place and keep an eye out that everything's kept clean and in order. I can't really do that without the house wards fully restored, and the only one who can restore them is the mistress of the manse. That's you."

"Oh, alright," Merrill said agreeably. "So I just...?"

"You just go in to each room and sort of feel around with your magic. I'll be pushing from my end, sort of like flexing a muscle here, and then when you feel the dead ward just wake it up a bit and it should come fully back online."

"Sounds simple enough," Merrill said, walking over to the nearest room to try it out.

The wards and spells in the rooms nearest the kitchen, and thus nearest the hearthstone were mostly still intact, but as she got further away from the hearth she could see the signs of deterioration and decay more and more. Merrill simply pressed her magic into the ward or spell, wriggling about and sending a sort of "healing" to fill in all of the places where entropy and decay had made holes in the spell. She reestablished the connections to the ward network and Lucien took over from there. It was careful work, but Merrill was a practiced mage so it wasn't particularly strenuous. In fact, she found the activity to be a bit enjoyable, she got to know each of the wards in the house on an individual basis.

There were wards for keeping things closed up, and opening things, for cleaning things and for sensing movement across the floor, for sealing doors and windows in order to defend the house. The house defensive systems primarily had to do with identifying persons moving about the house that should not be there, and activating the correct booby-trap magics that would stun or freeze or possibly even kill them. Merrill left the last wards alone as she felt that killing people was taking things a bit too far, but she restored all of the rest. When she checked in with Lucien on the hearth, his tiny flickering flame had brightened and grown into a warm and cheerful fire, crackling merrily in the little hearth.

"That is _so_ much better!" the fire said. "You don't even know. It's like I was seeing through lenses that were blurred so badly that I couldn't make out a thing, and trying to hear but it was so muffled that I couldn't. Now, everything's coming through clear as a bell. I have run of the whole place again."

As if to demonstrate his new prowess, the doors that led into and out of the kitchen all open and shut themselves a few times and the window shutters flapped happily in the sunshine flickering light in and out of the kitchen.

"Well I'm glad you're feeling better," she said.

"Just stick with me, kid," the fire said. "This place'll _never_ get that bad again!"

Merrill felt another pang of conscience for essentially interfering where she had no business being. Fenris was not at _all_ going to like a fully awakened hearth spirit hanging about in his place of residence. Magic in general gave him hives, and the more magic-y things got the less he liked them. She could only just imagine what things were going to be like when she gave him this particular news.

 _:Oh well, no sense worrying about it now,:_ she told herself. _:I'll simply have to ford that stream when I come to it.:_

"Last but not least... there's _this_ room!" Merrill said to herself about the central greatroom under the skylights, shelving the Spirit-problem for a later time.

It was easily the largest room in the house but strangely, it looked like it was going to be the easiest to clean. All of the walls and pillars were lined with smooth, shiny marble since it seemed to have been used mostly to impress people with. In addition, the hangings had kept away a lot of the dust and dirt from the walls, and she'd already cleaned most of the ceiling (or rather, replaced it). Merrill simply sprayed the walls with a heavy spray to collect the last of the dirt, then pressure-washed down the floors, replaced the tiles with a modified stonefist spell, then scrubbed them and pushed the dirty water out the doorway into the garden!

"Done!" she celebrated.

Then she reconsidered, looking at the enormous pile of laundry awaiting her and the sad, neglected state of Fenris' poor garden... really, those plants didn't deserve to be treated that way. She really couldn't bring herself to leave it unfinished.

"Well, mostly," she amended. "I think I'm done for the day anyway."

She'd soak her reclaimed (and terribly smelly!) blankets in the deep laundry-sink sink that evening while she ate her meal. She'd also found a fine, fluffy, featherbed that the animals had left mostly intact during her explorations, and she planned the clean that as well so she would have a better place to sleep than nested in laundry of questionable origins.

"It might all look like a whole new place now, but Creators! He can have it!" Merrill thought of the mansion itself.

"Heeey, don't say that, missus, you'll hurt it's feelings!" the hearthfire called over to her, having heard her as she entered the kitchen.

"It's too much _work_ to clean," Merrill replied firmly. "And it's ridiculous for one person to live in a place that's big enough to hold all of Sabrae Clan and half of the Alienage besides! Fenris must rattle around in here like a pea in a barrel!"

"No offense missy, but your Fenris ain't exactly running around playing master of the manse all day long. Most of my rooms he boarded up!"

Lucien sounded most put out about having the majority of his premises treated like a midden heap.

"What else would he have done with the rooms?" Merrill questioned the hearth spirit in reply. "it's not like he can live in them, unless he chose to sleep in a different room every night, and he doesn't really seem to have any hobbies besides keeping his war-skills sharp. He certainly doesn't seem inclined to clean them all day long."

"Still..." Lucien said grudgingly. "He didn't have ta lock 'em all up."

 "I do like that oven-thing though!" she commented aloud to Lucien, changing the subject. "Since Fenris doesn't seem to be using it, I wonder if I could get him to part with it..."

"There is little chance of that, I fear, mum," Pontius replied, joining their little company in the kitchen.

The mechanical butler-spirit-construct had busied himself by polishing the silver utensils. Merrill wasn't sure where they had all come from for she was quite certain that they hadn't been in any of the drawers when she'd cleared them out. He moved from polishing the silver to fussing with the makings for her dinner, and Merrill was happy to note that it was nearly done for she was famished!

"You're probably right on that account," Merrill said, sighing a bit wistfully at the fine dwarven stove and wishing she had the means to make one for herself.

She couldn't imagine the astronomical sort of bribe she would have to come up with to make _that_ happen. Even though it was not actually his in the strict, legal sense, Fenris was horribly territorial.

_:And even if he did let me have it, I'd have to get it all the way to the Alienage...:_

She had no problems with simply levitating it onto a cart with magic, but everyone else did. They didn't like magic happening where they could see it, and Varric had begged her not to be to obvious about being a mage right in front of everyone while he wasn't around to smooth things over for her.

"Be ignorable while I'm gone Daisy, please? For me?" he'd said.

Merrill had reluctantly promised she'd do her best not to attract attention.

"I think you're right Pontius," Merrill agreed with the hulking suit of armor. "Fenris is quite territorial. That reminds me, did you really spend all of this time blended in with the dead bodies in the hall? Didn't you ever want to get up and move around?"

"The former master included a resting mode in the spells that run me," Pontius replied. "I simply went in to rest mode and didn't notice the outer world. It's not unpleasant, though I do prefer activity, mum."

"Oh," Merrill fretted. "I don't know how Fenris is going to feel about more magic wandering around his home. You might have to go back to sleep for a while, or, well, maybe you could come with me."

"I regret mum, that I cannot leave the premises. I'm keyed to the wards."

"I see," she fretted even more. "Well, maybe I'll catch him in a good mood, then I can talk him into letting you run around."

"That would be nice, mum," said Pontius as he ladled out a bowl of soup for Merrill and brought it over to the table along with a basket of warm rolls and some butter.

"Oh! Look at that!" Merrill exclaimed, noticing something else new about the stove for the first time.

It had some sort of large reservoir attached to the back of it that she hadn't really noticed when she'd cleaned it, mostly out of impatience to fill her empty belly. Curious now, she took a closer look at the mysterious, funny-looking dwarven mechanism.

"I wonder what this is..." she thought, walking over to have a closer look.

It was like a large kettle with a tight lid that had a spout going out of it and a whole bunch of pipes leading to it. One of the pipes went directly to the laundry-tub in the kitchen with a branch-off pipe at the kitchen sink, another few went to the large master washroom in the upstairs, then the last went to the second bathroom. She couldn't fathom the purpose of the strange tank at first, but she studied the symbolic depictions that the dwarven creator who'd made it had embossed onto the side. The drawings were divided up into large, tile-sized squares, each with a picture in it.

"Hmmm, this square has... oh! it's the stove on it, but it has a little fire inside. This one has squiggly lines falling into the little round metal tank in the back. What could those little clouds pouring up out of it mean?" she mused aloud.

There was also a large picture of a hand with an X across it.

She blinked for a long minute then it hit her. The squiggly lines were supposed to mean water, and when water got hot it made steam, and steam looked like clouds so...

"It's for heating water!" she exclaimed, pleased at having solved the mystery. "That so very clever! That might be the cleverest thing I've ever seen!"

She'd read about the dwarven inventions that kept water warm, but she'd never seen one before. Merrill herself didn't need one because she was a mage, and heating water was easily one of the first spells she'd ever learned. She could see, however how people who couldn't heat their own water with magic and had to use a fire (or a stove) and pots of water to get a hot bath would find such an invention to be incredibly useful.

"In fact, given all of the water heating I've had to do today, it might have been nice for me to use it too!" Merrill thought aloud, wishing she'd noticed it sooner.

"Oh right..." Lucien said, coloring over to red in embarrassment. "I forgot about that thing."

"No worries," Merrill said. "It might have been nice, but I can manage to heat water perfectly well with my own magic. I think I should like to try it out though."

Interested now Merrill (having learned her lesson about pipes earlier!) first sent her magic along all of the pipes connected to the device to check for weakness of blockages along them before she filled a few of the largest copper pots with water from the faucet and dumped them into the little reservoir (once she figured out how to get the blasted, overly-clever thing open).

Pontius pointedly pulled out her little stool a the kitchen counter where her still-steaming bowl of soup and her rolls were waiting for her and waited at attention like a superior little butler. The armor had no expression whatsoever on its face, but it still manage to exude a sense of censure for Merrill to be playing with things while she should be eating. Obediently, Merrill went to the seat that the mechanical butler had prepared for her and ate her meal of stew thickened by a handful of the flour she'd bought and seasoned with herbs she'd grown herself. On the side she also had a roll of nice crusty bread she'd baked, with butter and honey on it, and a full pot of tea.

"I wonder why Fenris doesn't use this room more often, it's terribly convenient!" Merrill thought about the kitchen as she ate her meal.

"I believe the young master does not know how to cook, mum," Pontius supplied for her.

"Yeah, you could say that again," said Lucien. "Half o' that scummy mess near the stove was the results of his spectacular failures over the years. He finally just gave up and ate out all the time!"

Though he was notably careful and parsimonious with his coin, she'd only ever seen him eat from the Hanged Man or from roadside vendors scatered about kirkwall. It seemed that he couldn't cook at all, and ate from those dreadful roadside vendors only because he had no other choice. She'd seen the things they sold from their carts; they all seemed to sell fried bits of unrecognizeable things smothered in a mystery sauce that was as pastey as halla-hoof glue, or they sold stew the approxamite consistency of porridge and boiled to absolute tastelessness. She couldn't see how he could abide putting it in his mouth

"Well that might be good for us, then," Merrill said brightly. "That could mean that he can be bribed with food! Maybe if you promise to make meals for him, he'll be happier about your being here and awake."

"Sadly, neither of us can cook either. Poncy has the hands but not the brains, and I've got the brains, but no hands."

"I beg your pardon," Pontius said, affronted.

"Now now you two," Merrill soothed. "Lucien, you be nice. It's not done to accuse your clanmate of being brainless. Pontius does what he's good at and that's enough for anyone."

"Er, ah sure thing missus," Lucien said sounding chastened, and she smiled at him to soften her mild reprimand.

Finishing off her meal, Merrill realized that she'd forgotten to set her linens to soak as she'd meant to do earlier. However, since she'd quit her tasks for the day early, Merrill merely shrugged her shoulders and decided it was as good a time as any to test out the dwarven hot-water-maker-thing. She pulled all of the dirty linens she'd been (reluctantly) sleeping in over to the deep laundry sink, and turned on the tap. The thing didn't want to turn at first and Merrill was struggling with it when Pontius clanked over with the whole pile of laundry under one arm and gave it a good wrench. Hot, steamy water poured out of the spiggot and before Merrill could prompt one way or the other the mechanical-magic servant took the whole venture over like some sort of proprietary laundry-doer. Merrill surrendered the soap and the field to his strange proprietary diligence and turned to Lucien instead.

"I got the wards up around the house, how are they working for you?" she asked politely.

"Just fine, but you missed the library and the vault," the eharth-spirit replied.

"Oh I figured I'd tackle the library--" Merrill caught herself mid-reply, the words that Lucien had said finally caught up with her.

She looked curiously over at Lucien.

"Vault? I never heard anything about a vault in here," she said, her curiosity piqued. "Is it a secret? Is it a mystery? It sounds so exciting!"

Merrill felt positively titillated by the thought of exploring a place in the house that no-one even knew about before she'd come. Even though Keepers were supposed to probe the mysteries of the past, Keeper Marethari had generally kept Merrill's exploration of ancient ruins to a minimum, at least until the scouts had already explored them thoroughly to make sure that there were no traps. Merrill had always been secretly disappointed by this.

"The old master was a rich fellow, and a racist, so he didn't trust dwarven banks," the hearth Spirit explained. "The vault below this place is where he kept his _real_ assets. It's only accessible to the master of the house and the protections on it are all of the deadliest sort. Even the master of the house cant get in without the Master Key."

"Oh," Merrill said, feeling a bit disappointed. "Well where's the Master Key then?"

"It's in the hidden safe under the built-in map-table in the Library," Lucien said. "You get to it by triggering a series of catches in the woodwork while simultaneously unlocking the correct wards. I'll do that part since you're new to it."

Feeling a rush of elation at having an exciting mystery of her own to explore, Merrill hurried up the stairs to the Library.

"My goodness!"she exclaimed upon entry.

The huge sunken library was a huge, dusty mess! Rather than neatly populating the shelves, many of the shelves stood all but empty and there were piles and boxes of books stacked willy-nilly about the room.

"I suppose my stacking things up on the tables and floors didn't help any either," she admitted to herself.

As she'd been cleaning around the house, she'd discovered that Fenris used books for just about everything _but_ their intended purpose. She'd found them propping open doors and windows, weighting down things that might otherwise have shifted about, used as impromptu serving trays (often with plates and cups still on them!). The book-fiend in Merrill had winced every time, doubly so if it looked like the book had come to some damage from its unintended use. She'd been busy doing other things, so Merrill had simply stacked the piles of books and papers on the nearest open flat surface and kept at her original task. The room was still dusty for she had not cleaned in it because of the books and all of the wooden shelves which would be difficult to clean due to the fact that the woodwork was intricately carved.

"Well!" she exclaimed to herself in amazement.

The library was sizable, with shelves so high that they required a ladder to reach the top. Every shelf held at least some books, though it was clear that some had been taken from their places over time and never put back. Scanning the titles on the first shelf, Merrill quickly realized that the books had either become hopelessly mixed up over time, or there had never been any attempt to organize them to begin with! Children's shemlen folktales stood beside works of mathematics, "A Breif History of the Wool Trade" sat sandwiched in between "Mumpingtons Almanac" and "A Fanciful Fish." The bibliophile in Merrill wanted to take them all down from the shelves and dust and organize properly.

 _:It would take more than one day though,:_ she thought feeling partly intimidated and partly eager. "Probably more than two days."

Her eye fell upon a book entitled "Mysteries and Ways: A Curious Study of Elven Artifacts" by an unknown author and Merrill felt briefly excited, until she opened it and discovered that it had very obviously been written by a Shem without the _least_ idea of what he was talking about. Flicking through it to read a passage here and there revealed that the author had clearly written it to prove a point of some specious "moral superiority" with regard to magic over her people, and she was unusually tempted than to use the dreadful thing for fire-lighting material. The bibliophile in her couldn't countenance the idea of burning a book however, and she simply stuck the awful thing back on a pile.

Her own shelves of books that she had kept in her little house in the Alienage were more varied than any Keeper's library. Most of them were about magic, it was true, but unlike the books kept in her people's aravells (limited by space and weight) Merrill had collected magic books from every culture that had ever studied the arcane! She had works from Rivaini Dream-seers, studies ad theories about lyrium and the Fade itself from the Dwarves, tomes of esoteric magics from Tevinter (who, it turned out, apparently were not blood mages down to the last man... the lesser mages were either servants to the greater or scholars and researchers, though they did tend to like creepy spirit bindings which Merrill didn't care for). Of course she had elven scrolls and translations wherever she could find them, but unlike the Dalish, she mixed them in with works written by modern elves in the Circle Towers. Her shelves also housed more prosaic things like engineering and mathematical texts from the Dwarves, or some things about trade and politics and history because she didn't know about them and she was curious.

Wading past the first bookshelf however revealed that it wasn't as bad as she'd feared from her perusal of that first book. Merrill found several expensive titles on the next shelf that she'd wanted to take a look at, but couldn't have afforded to buy without selling herself into slavery... which would never happen. Traveling further back showed her that whoever had kept this house before the tenant before Fenris had taken over had to have been a voracious reader, or at least, came from a family of them for there were books on wide ranges of subjects all jumbled together willy-nilly. She didn't find any real books about magic and thought that a disappointment but also a mystery because, according the Fenris, the former master of the manse had been a mage as well as a merchant. And there was Lucien in the house, so clearly he practiced the craft, albeit secretly in Kirkwall.

Merrill shook her head to dispell the thoughts and got to her original mission. Lucien had told her that the location of the switch could be found In the table itself. Looking at the table Merrill gasped a bit in surprise and delight. Instead of being paper or cloth like all of the maps she'd seen before, the surface of the table was covered in what looked like enameled metal done in different colors! The surface was made of tiny rounded metal bits, each about the size of the head of a pin and enameled in different colors. The small size of the metal heads made it possible to achieve a great amount of detail in the depiction. The ocean was blue and there were even what looked to be diagrams of currents embossed in darker blue in them. Mountains were detailed in brown, forests in green, there were even roads and modern-day cities picked out, tapestry like, on the surface of the great table-map.

The elven mage oriented herself on the map as the Spirit had instructed and discovered that there was a large round knob directly in the center of the large wooden rim around the edge of the map just as the spirit had said there would be. When she pressed her palm flat on it to grasp it, she felt the house wards come alive beneath her palm, testing her to see that she was in fact keyed into the wards. She dimly sensed Lucien verifying her magical signature before the wards relented and subsided into a quiescent state, acknowledging her right to be there. Merrill turned the mechanical knob and kept turning just as she had been instructed to do. It made a soft clickey-cranking noise as the wound it round.

"OH!" she gasped in surprise and wonder as she reached the end of its winding and let it go.

The table made a soft whirring noise and then slowly went from a single flat map made of tiny rounded pins to an equally detailed but enormously more impressive elevation-map. Mechanics within the table expanded and filled in all of the details. Towers and walls sprang up little gears spreading out petal-thin sheets and filigree to flesh out the buildings of Thedas' cities, mountains lifted and spread and oceans roiled.

"This is... _amazing_!" she breathed in wonder, enchanted by watching the little mechanical towns and towers spring up, exact in every detail as the original author had known them when he'd fashioned the little table.

It was dwarven make obviously, what with all of the little gears and all, but it made Merrill want to make her own version out of magic. She might be able to manage something similar if she had the time and enough resources to work with...

"That's not what I'm here for," Merrill reminded herself.

She reached down to the little mechanical scale model of Kirkwall, with its great chained figures guarding the harbor and pressed down gently on the Tower of the Gallows. After a moment of hesitance, the topof the tower whirred and retracted into the table, spreading outward into the ocean and then tranforming somehow into another knob-like thing surrounded by indentations marked with tevinter symbols. She turned the knob in the sequence that Lucen had given to her, deactivating each ward as she went, just as the Hearth Spirit had shown her.

"...Aaand, there!" she said as she turned the last turn and unlocked the last ward. 

Unexpectedly, the table itself clanked and clicked loudly and Merrill jumped back in surprise, concerned that she'd done something wrong. Instead the whole surface began to rise upward. What she had taken to be a solid mass supposrting the tabletop began to move and shift, parts pulling out and in as the table grew upwards toward the ceiling. Finally, the two half-sections that she'd taken to act as legs, pulled to either side to reveal four long, large locked safes as tall as she was! 

She turned the knob as Lucien had instructed her opened the door in the safe nearest to her. The contents of the safe revealed a few large pouches filled with coins, what looked to be a set of three large leather-bound ledgers, several slim boxes that Merrill opened out of curiosity to discover that they were filled with extra fancy jewelry, (no mere trinkets those, they were genuine wearable art made of the finest gems and metals). Last but not least there was a fancy-looking box with intricate designs in mother of pearl and gold inlay centered around some fancy crest on the top.

"That must be the box with the Master Key," she muttered. "Such a lot of bother over this thing!"

Merrill took the fancy box back with her to the kitchen, pressing the switch on the left hand side of the door to bring the map-table back down to its original position. She admired the retty box on her way back to the kitchen where the next mystery awaited her and tried to imagine what she might find in the vault.

:It the magic, it must be!: Merrill though, nearly a'titter with expectation.

There had been no tomes of magical research hidden anywhere in the library so, being a cautious mage in a city crawling with Yemplars, the previous master of the manse must have hidden his magical tomes and his work down in a vault guarded by magic. Her mind buzzed with excitement as she tried to imagie the possibilities. There might be scrolls and tomes of lore she'd never dreamed of owning, or maybe even something new! There might even be lyrium down there. Or perhaps a nice set of dwarven runestones.

The kitchen seemed a terribly prosaic place to hide the entrance to a vault, but she couldn't deny the logic of having the wards keyed into the hearthstone, which was the traditional center of the home. When she arrived back at the kitchen, however, the hearth had transformed itself. Instead of being the waist-high but curiously round hearth she'd known, the stones had seemed to rearrange themselves and a strange sort of pedestal-like feature had risen up from the center, while the rest seemed to have formed into a strange sort of hole. 

"Ya got the key, an' I got the front door open for ya, but yer not done yet," Lucien said. "Just use the Master Key in the lock on this stone to reveal the stairs, then once you get to the bottom there's more mage-locks on the vault door itself. They reset every hour on the hour so they'll never be the same twice. Though I don't know what he was so worried about at this point, any thief would've had ta go though me first as well as the house wards!"

Merrill refrained from comment and opened the box to pull out a large key made of metal and crystal. It was one solid blue-clear crystalline stone that hummed with magic and glowed softly in the light. The top had an ovelay of the house crest in thin gold wire that then wrapped round with intricate curling designs along the shaft and the ornate tooth of the key. Merrill could feel it keyed in with the wards of the house. She took the key and placed it in the dusty keyhole of the hearthstone and turned it, unlocking the wards. The hearthstone pulled into the back of the fireplace and the stone tiles of the floor irised out to reveal a winding metal staircase spiraling down into the dark. She summoned a wisplight and started down the tight, cramped-feeling stairs, heart pounding with excitement and anticipation.

"If it's a vault in a mage-house, it must hold some truly _great_ magical treasures!" Merrill thought to herself, thinking of the books on arcane magical lore and the artifacts that the mage had likely found and stored away where no-one could get to it.

"Maybe there's even an eluvian!" she thought, heart aflutter with anticipation.

It had not been unknown for Shemlen to happen upon the treasures of her people and take them away to keep them for themselves. Maybe there were elven artifacts down there, something her people hadn't found. After all, the Shemlen had done a great deal of "grave-robbing" over the years, and she would have been willing to bet her last good set of Vestments of the First that they'd simply been sold and traded on Shemlen markets instead of returned to their rightful owners.

"Oh! There must be some wonderful magical artifacts down here!" she thought, highly excited now. "Or some books! Ones they couldn't allow the Templars to know they have."

She reached the door and quickly solved the puzzle (which was not nearly so difficult as she was sure the original creator of the spell had probably thought it was), then inserted her key again, feeling the wards rush out at her then suck back into the stone.

"Here it is..." she thougt elatedly as she pushed the last doorway in, heart pounding in excitement at the thought of all the wonderful magical secrets that must be hidden within. She summoned wisplights to illuminate the inside and...

Her heart sank. The light of the wisps didn't fall upon any ancient lost artifacts. There were no curiosities, no books, no scrolls, certainly no eluvian. There was only shelf after shelf of ordinary, boring bars of gold and silver. The gold glimmered with lustrous shine back at her, while the silver shone with tarnished dullness. Pretty enough she supposed, but they were utterly uninteresting in their measured, stacked sameness. There wasn't a single _hint_ of magic to be found anywhere.

"Oh..." Merrill muttered in disappointment.

Still hopeful she might have missed something, she looked around the vault more closely. The shelves of silver and gold bars actually only took up the top half of the walls, the were deep drawers built into the bottoms of the shelves that were all locked and keyed into the Master Key. Merrill, thinking she'd found where he'd hidden the _real_ treasure (the artifacts!) eagerly rushed over and turned her Master Key into the nearest lock and pulled out a drawer.

"Oh!" this must be it!" she celebrated, finding stacks of little chests bound in iron, each one mage-locked.

She eagerly pulled out a chest opened one, heart fluttering once again and holding her breath in anticipation of a wonderful little magical treasure...

It was full of _coins_. Her heart sank again in disappointment as she fished through it. There were twenty purses exactly, each holding a certain number of coppers, silvers or gold coins. There were different pouches for different currencies. There was no magic, just boring old _money_.

"Oh who keeps nothing but gold in a secret room, anyway!" Merrill exclaimed in frustration, hopes of a wonderful new mystery to explore dashed.

There was only one other thing out of the ordinary in the vault and that was a small little safe-like cupboard built into the back wall-shelf. She opened it with the Master Key to discover a large flat box, also locked. Curious, she unlocked and opened it to discover a thick stack of fancy, official-looking documents with stamps and seals and sanctions on them. She scanned the first page, wadig through legalese to discover that the document in her hand was the deed to the house and grounds, followed by wills and testaments asserting that the holder of the Master Key (Merrill) was the rightful heir, owner and true successor of the mansion, attached lands and wealth and all property to be found therein, as well as all duties taxes thithes and other debits accrued in such. It was all but official... Merrill was the owner of the house.

She looked around at all of the stacked bars of gold.

"Well, that was a _waste_ ," Merrill muttered in disappointment. "I got excited all for nothing. I get all the way down here and it's nothing but coins and a bunch of gold bricks you couldn't even build a house with!"

Merrill left the deeds and other things in the strongbox, figuring she'd ask Aveline about them later and walked back up the cramped steps to the kitchen and had Lucien replace the hearth wall.

"So, what did ya think?" Lucien asked excitedly. "Pretty impressive huh? I mean, ya can't eat it or anything but boy did those shem ever make a big deal about it!"

"Oh... it's nice... I guess," Merrill said trying not to sound as disappointed as she felt. "It's very shiny and... heavy. It would make something good to hold down papers with or prop open books. I was hoping for something a little more... _magical_ than that."

"What do you need with magic, Missie? Ya got me!"

Merrill smiled over at him.

"I suppose I should be looking at that laundry to see if it's ready to..."

Merrill looked over at the laundry tub she'd left Pontius at only to discover that the hulking metal giant was wringing away at a blanket, looking happy as a kitten with a fish.

"Well!" she exclaimed to herself. "Its really done the trick then hasn't it?"

When she pulled out the sheets and blankets, they were all nearly as while as they had been when they'd been bought. There were some a few very very faint traces of where old stains had been, but they were all thoroughly clean. Merrill sent her magic into the fibers, squeezing out the water and letting gravity carry it downward where it dripped onto the clean kitchen floor as the top dried completely in her hands. Moments later Merrill had dried and folded all of her bed linens and then began the painstaking work of magically drying out the thick animal-ridden featherbed she'd rescued from a trunk. It had been soaking in another tub and she had to send her magic through the feathers from the inside out, slowly evaporating away the water and leaving behind a clean, thick feather mattress.

 _:That's quite a task!:_ sh thought when she was done, having worked up another sweat to add onto the massive pile of work she'd done already that day. She felt positively covered in grime and sweat from all of the cleaning she'd done that day and she looked over at the freshly cleaned laundry tubs in the kitchen.

 _:No reason **I** shouldn't have a wash too while I'm at it!:_ she thought a bit longingly.

All the cleaning and magical lifting had been hard sweaty work and she'd so far only had a wash up by dunking into a barrel of water and scrubbing down quickly. The laundry tub was deep enough to have hot water up to her neck if she sat cross-legged down in it, and she could wash her clothes at the same time! She drained the laundry tub of its harsh lye-soap water and washed it quickly, then poured herself a bath of gloriously hot water, stripped down and got in.

 _:Ah! Much better!_ : she luxuriated.

Even for a mage, hot baths were hard to come by in the Alienage. The well water was often chancy at best, and she had no tub in her little house to wash in. Mostly she had to content herself with a sponge bath from a bucket, which was better than nothing but not by much. She washed up her clothes, her sweat-knotted hair, and the rest of her body, and decided to soak for a while in the hot hot water to let it soothe muscles that were a bit sore from overwork. It felt nice!

So of _course_ that was the exact moment when Fenris decided to return to his residence.

"Intruder alert!" Lucien called out suddenly.

Merrill sighed a bit to herself, sensing exactly who had decided to cross her threshold via the magic link she shared with the wards of the house.

"That's just Fenris, Lucien, you know that," she replied.

"Want me ta lock 'im out so you kin have yer bath?" Lucien asked. "I can do that, y'know."

"Oh let him be," she giggled. "He's probably tired and hungry. A better thing to do might be to sweeten his mood with some good food and a nice, friendly greeting."

"I mighta ben asleep all o' this time, but I wasn't entirely unaware of those who moved within my wards Missie," Lucien said a little dryly. "I don' think that guy's temper's gonna turn up sweet for anything less than a whole personality transplant!"

Merrill restrained a giggle of agreement and hurriedly finished washing herself.

She reluctantly removed herself from the tub she'd been washing in and drained it while she dried her Vestments and put them back on.

"Alright, there he is," she said to the hearthfire and to Pontius. "You two lay low while he's here, at least until I can get him talked 'round to the idea of his house being controlled by a ward-spirit and a Pontius."

"Sure thing, Missie!" The heartfire said, shrinking himself back down into a little flicker.

Pontius heaved a big sigh, like a dog that had been told to go lay down in his bed, but went and hid in the former broom closet. Merrill took up the tray he'd gotten out for her before he went into hiding and mentally debated what to tempt Fenris with.

 _:He's probably hungry,_ : Merrill thought absently.

He was already likely to be grouchy at having returned to find her there, adding hunger to the pile would make his already uncertain temper surely snappish and irritable.

 _:A preemptive food-strike might sweeten his temper a bit,:_ Merrill thought hopefully.

Before she left the kitchen she loaded down a tray with a large bowlful of soup from the pot she still had simmering, took a few rolls from the basket she'd set to warm on the oven (because there were few things better than warm rolls!), cut off some cheese from the wheel she'd bought and looked around for something to add as a drink.

:He'll have to drink water,: she decided, filling a cup from the tap. She wasn't going to give him wine, he was disagreeable enough without alcohol.

She found him standing in the main room, the one with the stairs, tensely holding his sword and peering into the shadows, looking for enemies. It struck Merrill as extremely funny suddenly; the look of intense suspicion on his face as he searched for the bounty hunters that had come to take him away... but first, they were going to announce their presence by cleaning his home!

"Relly Fenris!" she exclaimed, giggling. "Do you think that if I were some sort of slaver from Tevinter, or wherever, I'd have taken all of the trouble to clean up your sty before I ambushed you?"

He looked over and scowled darkly at her. Merrill looked patiently back at him, unimpressed with his dark looks after all of this time. She held up the tray of food instead.

"Here, have something to eat before your face stays that way. Honestly!"

Merrill simply decided to act like there was nothing out of the ordinary about her showing up unannounced and uninvited while he was away and cleaning his house for him. Fenris stalked over to her, glaring menacingly at her the whole time. She put the tray of food in his hands before he could reach over to toss her out, and he looked down at it like he'd never seen food before.

"There's some stools down in the kitchen if you'd like to sit and eat your meal like a civilized person," she prompted.

"I have a kitchen?" he questioned, then blinked as though he'd just remembered. "Ah... I do remember it now. It has been overrun by rats."

"I'm surprised you don't get on better with them," she teased. "They're _almost_ as foul-tempered as you are."

She walked back down to the kitchen and left him to either follow along behind her or go to his own quarters and eat alone.

"It is... clean in here. Your doing, I assume," he said stiffly looking around like he didn't recognize the place. Merrill didn't blame him for that, she hardly recognized it herself.

"Good thing too," Merrill said without apology. "Your rooftop was halfway rotted through. Much more and it would have collapsed in on you one soggy night."

"How would you know?" he questioned edgily.

"I'm a Dalish Nature mage, remember? I can tell when wood is rotted, Fenris. Welcome home, by the way."

She added the greeting just to annoy him. She knew he hated it when she was always so unfailingly kind and polite to him because it made his own attitude reflect worse on him... that didn't stop him from being disagreeable of course, but at least most who knew them knew that Merrill wasn't the one instigating the quarrel. Unlike he and Anders, who were like two weasels in a whipple-pot.

He frowned at her even as he looked around the miraculously cleaned and organized kitchen with its gleaming stone countertops and cheerfull fire. Merrill seated herself at the table and gestured to the only other empty stool in the room. The frown lessened ever so slightly as Fenris seated himself and tucked into the meal she'd offered him. It seemed that a life as a fugitive had taught him to eat when he had the chance, for Fenris ate like it might be stolen from him at any moment. Merrill recalled what little he'd said about Hadrianna and her amusements and felt a pang of pity; maybe part of him still did think it would be stolen from him.

Figuring it was better to have something useful to do, Merrill took out a mixing bowl and the ingredients for bread and began the process of making more dough for bread in the morning. The dough could be left in the preservation box without it rising too much overnight, and it would be much easier to bake first thing rather than wait for the dough to rise and delay breakfast.

Pontius peeked out from his broom closet and Merrill covertly gave him a shooing motion with her hand. He looked so sad as he hunkered back down out of sight. She looked over at the hearth where Lucien resided just to make certain the Spirit wasn't making mischief, a small fire flickered dimly, but it looked like he'd decided to go to sleep for the flames were prosaic-looking.

"Why have you intruded here?" Fenris demanded, quite rudely. "I have given you no indication that your presence is at all welcome, witch."

"Friends don't let friends live in nasty, dirty pig sties," she replied, then a bit more hesitantly, she added

"I... um, I wanted to thank you."

"For what?" he prompted impatiently.

"Well, you saved me from that enemy the last time we were out. And you went back to look for me and pulled me out of that pit, even though you don't like me."

"As to the first it is no less than what I've done at other times to save your miserable, foolish neck. As to the second, I was not the only one looking for you, I just happened to have been the one to find you. I do not see what about either instances warrants this incursion."

"We're not traveling with Hawke anymore, there's nothing stopping you from letting the axe fall. I know you think about it, sometimes, how easy it would be I mean, I see it in your eyes," Merrill said honestly. "But you don't. You still defend me and look for me when I'm lost, and I'm grateful."

"Don't you have an Alienage full of elves to fuss over," he huffed. "I am sure they must be missing you."

"Wellll... not exactly," she said uncomfortably. "The ones who were with me before managed to find other places that would take them in. Some went to Ostwick and others to Nevarra, a few went off to the Dalish, if they can find them. The ones that stayed... well none of them much like blood mages, even if I'm not using it so much anymore."

"You didn't use your foul blood magic _here_ did you?" he growled warningly, narrowing his eyes at her.

"Oh calm down," she said. "D'you think I want to listen to you lecture? It's all done with ordinary natural magic, no blood magic involved."

"That is _not_ a vast improvement," he said stiffly, but his tone very slightly conceded that it was an improvement, however small.

He finished off the soup and Merrill took up his bowl without prompting and gave him another helping from the ever-simmering soup pot and offered more rolls then pulled the honey from the dry pantry and the butter from the cool-storage to put them on the table.

 _:He's barely been unpleasant at all!:_ Merrill marveled to herself. _:It seems that if I keep his mouth stuffed with food, he can't use it for his usual bitter diatribes.:_

"Did you..." he hesitated a bit. "Did you clean all of this place?"

"Most of it," Merrill replied, feeling a pardonable bit of pride in her hard work. "I had to get rid of a bunch of your roof because it was all soggy and rotted through, but I replaced it so it won't leak. Also, I replaced those ceiling-glass panels and the windows that were cracked and missing too. The upstairs was mostly empty, I left the room you live in alone because I know your temper. The library is the same too, though I've picked up all of the books you've scattered everywhere."

Merrill eyed him with a bibliophile's disfavor for anyone treating a book roughly.

"The downstairs is all scrubbed down. That was easier for some reason, but there's still a mountain of linens and other things that need washing."

She brightened.

"Speaking of washing, you'll never believe what interesting thing I found on the back of this clever dwarven cooking contraption..."

Merrill proudly relayed her discovery to him, and pointed out the pipes that ran up to different rooms carrying hot water as well as cold with them.

"There is no water," Fenris said flatly. "Or a sewage-line for that matter. The city has shut off the supply since the building has been condemned. I have collected rainwater in barrels to bathe in since I've lived here."

"Oh... is _that_ what that thing was? It was put there on purpose?" Merrill mused, at last understanding that the obstruction under the house that seemed to have been chained in place was actually done on purpose. "Um... well it's gone now. I needed a lot more than just some rainwater to get this place clean!"

"That is a lot of effort for you to go through without expectation of reward," he said mistrustfully.

Merrill sighed and shook her head sadly at him.

"Friends don't do things because they want to be rewarded, friends do things because they want to help."

"Who said we were friends?" he demanded.

"You did, when you saved my life," Merrill replied firmly as she put the dough to rise on the window sill.

 _:I don't know whether I'm relieved or a little sad to be finished here,:_ she thought as she went to where she'd leaned her staff. _:But it's pretty clear he'd rather be by himself now, so I should probably go. I cn talk with him about Pontius and Lucien when he's had a chance to settle in.:_

"Now Fenris," she cautioned as she gathered up her cloak and staff in preparation to depart. "Be careful when you use the stove, the knobbley thing that adjusts the temperature is right on the front. Don't burn yourself by making the flames shoot up too high. You can leave the soup on the back burner to keep simmering, but don't turn it any higher than what I've set it on or you'll burn it to the bottom if you leave it. There's the last of the eggs, butter and milk in the cold-pantry, use them up before they go bad. I've warded the place against pests, but don't tempt them by leaving things out in the open, there's pantries in plenty for storage here in the kitchen."

"It's the middle of the night," he pointed out. "And you've the worse sense of direction out of anyone I've ever met... and there's gangs everywhere still."

"That's why I've been camped here," Merrill admitted. "That and it's easier than walking to and from the Alienge every day just to put in a full days work cleaning this place."

"You may stay the night, if you wish," he said, clearly reluctant.

"No that's alright," Merrill demurred, sensing that he didn't actually like the idea of her hanging around. "I can find my own way home, Fenris."

He sighed and looked back at her impatiently.

"You misunderstand, witch," he said, his tone as autocratic as ever. "Stay here. Varric would do the magisters work for them by skinning me and sending my hide back to Tevinter if he ever found out I let you walk all the way from one end of the town to the other alone at night and allowed you to get lost. Or worse."

"Oh..."

_:Well if he puts it like that...:_

It wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was about typical for Fenris. He did have a third helping of food, and another roll, then took his dishes to the sink without prompting... however, he merely set them in the sink and didn't clean them. It appeared that he couldn't blame all of his mess on the previous tenants and the fact that the place was abandoned. Merrill held her tongue and cleaned up after him.

"Where have you been sleeping?" he demanded next, still looking at her with suspicion. "You haven't been in my quarters have you?"

"I camped in one of the rooms upstairs," she replied. "I've already washed some of the linens and blankets and I found a featherbed in that room over there that I've just cleaned out."

"Hn," he grunted acknowledgement when she indicated the pile of things she meant to sleep on. "Then I bid you goodnight."

"Sweet dreams," she said. "Oh! One more thing. The bathing room upstairs next to your little nest is all washed out now, and the hot water's been topped off, so if you want to have a proper bath in the copper tub in that room next to yours it should work just fine."

Fenris blinked back at her, expression unreadable, then turned abruptly and stalked out, looking for all the world like a wet cat. An irritated wet cat. But perhaps the two were synonymous, she'd never seen a cat that was happy to be wet.

Merrill had just finished laying out the featherbed she'd washed out completely inside and out in preparation for a well deserved nights rest when she heard a peculiar hissing noise as water rushed through the pipes. She didn't hear a yell down the stairs to summon her, so she assumed that everything with his bath was in order.

 _:I hope he likes it,:_ Merrill thought to herself.

She didn't hear any cursing or angry ranting from upstairs so she moved to take up her heavy pile of cleaned bed things, only to discover that Pontius had snuck out of the closet and was set on carrying them for her.

"Oh come along then," Merrill chuckled at the big metal lug. "We can put them all in this little room over here. There seems to have been a bedframe in this old servants room that's survived mostly intact."

Pontius deposited the thick, fluffy feather mattress on the frame that was stretched not with ordinary rope but with wide, strap-like flat ropes that were woven tightly together almost like a basket. The feather mattress sat on the frame quite nicely without any digging in when she put her weight on it and Pontius very properly spread out the cleaned bed linens over the mattress and added on the blankets before he let her climb in.

"Good night, and don't forget to hide yourself in case Fenris comes down here," she reminded him.

"Yes, mum," the mechanical servant said properly. "Sleep well."

Merrill was half asleep the moment she'd crawled into bed, and it felt like only an instant later that her mind fell into the Fade.


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning dawned bright and clear through the large, clean steel-glass window she'd installed in the small room she'd taken for herself just off the kitchen. She thought it might have once been the servants quarters, for they were noticeably smaller than the other rooms in the house and there were the broken remains two sets of stacked-beds on either side of the rooms. There was another room that exactly mirrored this one right across the tiny abbreviated hallway just off the kitchen that had probably been for servants of the opposite gender to sleep in. There was even a tiny washroom shared between the two servant quarters and she felt the need to make use of the flushing waste-disposal bowl.

Merrill's stomach rumbled loudly, prompting her to get herself out of bed, despite the fact that her new feather bed was so soft and comfortable that she would much rather have stayed in it.

"Breakfast time, for certain," she cajoled herself out of that lovely warm hollow.

She was hungry, and if the night previous was any indication, the only way she'd ever seen of keeping Fenris anything remotely resembling congenial was to keep his belly full!

She woke up the emberstone in the stove and pulled the prepared dough out of the preservation pantry and set it on the counter to finish rising while she pulled together a porridge from the small bag of oats she'd bought at the market. A mix of milk and water with a pinch of salt and a double handful of oats was set on low heat. She added in crushed almonds, honey, sweet-bark and some dried berries to cook in.

Pontius poked his head out of the storage closet and looked at her hopefully, clearly wanting to take part in the goings on in the kitchen.

"Sorry Pontius," Merrill said. "You'll have to hide in there for now, I don't think that Fenris is a morning person. It's too bad really, because there's still Laundry Mountain to conquer today, I could surely use you around to help carry the water and linens. Perhaps breakfast will bribe him into a good mood. I should make the best breakfast!"

If last night was anything to go by, the only way Fenris' temper was going to be anything like manageable was if she filled his stomach first!

She stuck the morning rolls in the oven and pulled out a small rasher of bacon and the eggs she'd bought from the market the day before. She set the bacon to frying in a flat cast-iron pan with an ingenious little handle on it that Merrill couldn't help admiring. The Dalish used large griddle-pans that they balanced on stones over the fire to fry with, and they could occasionally be a bit challenging. Eggs in particular could be an adventure if the griddle wasn't balanced just right.

"I wonder if he likes his bacon crispy or not..." Merrill mused aloud as she began to chop up onions, mushrooms, garlic, peppers and tiny bits of bacon off the rasher for the eggs.

"I like bacon crispy," Lucien prompted her hopefully. "I like bacon any way you'll make it."

Merrill smiled over at him, recalling their conversation about food.

"Do you really stick around on this side of the Fade, minding this house, for scraps of human food, Lucien?" she asked.

"You betcha bottom Soveriegn I do!" Lucien said emphatically. "We don't got nuthin' like it on the other side, let me tell you. Real food.... _ooh_ , there's nuthin' like it."

"I had thought, from what you said about knowing Spirits who knew things and your work with the wards, that you might have been a Spirit of Wisdom... now I'm beginning to think you're a Spirit of Gluttony," she teased as she fed him some strips of bacon and a spoonful of porridge.

"Those're usually the bad sort," he corrected, mouth full. "The food thing is incidental, but I like it here, it's warm, its cozy..."

"Suit yourself then," she said with a shrug.

The bacon fried with a heavenly arroma and she cracked all of the eggs into a mixing bowl and mixed them with milk then poured the mixture into the bacon grease while keeping a careful watch on the porridge to make certain it didn't cook to the bottom. A kettle of water took up the last of the free space on the stove to brew her morning tea with. Morning tea was strong enough to wake the dead and utterly undrinkable without honey in her opinion, but she had a feeling it would suit Fenris. The eggs cooked quickly and when they were partly done she added in the vegetables and put thinly sliced pieces of cheese on top to melt while the omlettes finished cooking the rest of the way.

"Fenris!" she called up the steps. "Breakfast!"

The rolls came out of the oven perfectly and Merrill marveled at the ingenious dwarven device and wanted one for her own little house... well, actually her little house in the Alienage was _gone_. It had been burnt by the fires from falling debris and the last of it wrecked by shemlen Purgers hunting where they weren't wanted and making nuisances of themselves before she'd sent them on their way with a firestorm to give them something to think about!

The array of breakfast laid out on the stone-topped island in the center of the kitchen that now doubled as the table they ate at looked like a miniature feast but Merrill knew she was going to need it all for the day ahead, because laundry was one of those chores that one couldn't make a whole lot easier with magic unless one wanted to expend more magic than was sensible to do something that could more easily be done by hand.

The lyrium warrior emerged through the doorway, shirtless and frowning, with a head of hair that looked like squirrels had wintered over in it. He was trying not to be too obvious about the fact that he was sniffing the air and Merrill politely pretended not to notice while she pulled the small pot of honey and the butter from the cold pantry to set on the table.

"You... really did clean the entire place," he said as he sat down at the empty stool he'd sat at the night before.

"Top to bottom," she confirmed with a nod as she piled two plates with exactly halved portions of eggs, bacon, and two equally portioned bowls of porridge.

She brought the plates over and set them at their places then went to get the bread basket with the fresh rolls and the cream from the cold pantry. Merrill ignored the way Fenris was watching her every move suspiciously, as though he expected to catch her pouring blood into the bacon grease and summoning a demon.

 _:And just what sort of demon, I wonder, does he think I'll call up? A kitchen demon?:_ she thought to herself with an inward roll of her eyes. _:Lo mortal, tremble in abject terror as your bread shall never again rise, nor your bacon fry crispy at the edges! Fear me!:_

Merrill certainly didn't count Pontius or Lucien in the category of Demon, but she knew for an almost certainty that Fenris _would_.

"I assume you mean to quit the premises, witch," he said with no preamble whatsoever as she dug into the breakfast she'd made him.

It seemed her hopes about food sweetening his sour temper had been in vain.

"After I've finished what I've started Fenris," Merrill replied evenly. "There's still the mountain of laundry to wash, and the back garden to restore."

Otherwise it would just prey on her thoughts, nagging at her with that irritable feeling of a ask left undone.

"Neither are necessary," he said shortly.

"It'll bother me otherwise," she said with a shrug.

"So you're just doing all of this for your own satisfaction, because disorder bothers you," Fenris snarled.

 _:Hard to take his snarl seriously when his mouth is stuffed with eggs,:_ Merrill thought in amusement.

"I started this as a gesture of thanks, and in the hopes you might like it, but my own personality is the sort that can't stand leaving a task unfinished once I get to work on it," she replied easily.

"I suppose then, you think you'll just make yourself free with my place, once you've restored it," he snapped at her.

"Oh don't be silly," she soothed.

 _:It'd take more than a clean house and a stove to make me put up with **your** unpleasant temper day in and day out!:_ she thought but did not say.

She really would like that stove though. And the garden too. She could grow a lot of useful herbs in a space like the one he had behind his house.

 _:In fact, why don't I do just that?:_ Merrill thought to herself.

His sharpness and ill grace with her after she'd gone out of her way to treat him kindly was starting to wake up her contrary streak. She'd take over his garden and grow all manner of useful plants and come and harvest them regularly for medicines and he'd be none the wiser.

"Then why do any of this?" he demanded sharply. "You must want something from me, you're hiding it from me, out with it!"

Merrill looked back at him and felt sorry for him. He really wasn't listening, or maybe he had so little experience with kind deeds done for the sake of pleasing someone that he suspected ulterior motives everywhere he looked.

 _:Or maybe it's just because he sees I'm a mage and wants to tar me with the same brush that he paints every other mage with!:_ Merrill thought, now seriously beginning to reconsider the idea of doing the laundry.

It would mean one more day there, and she could see already that he was going to be hovering watchfully nearby, staring right over her shoulder like some sort of Templar of House Cleaning. Then again, she knew if she left now that laundry would sit there in its pile, unwashed, and she also knew that the knowledge of it sitting there would eat away at her. There was no helping it... she was going to finish what she'd started.

"Have another roll then," Merrill said instead, buttering one and pouring honey on it and placing it on his emptied plate.

She took her own dishes to the smaller dish-sink under the window and washed them then exited the kitchen to set about conquering Laundry Mountain. The large pile of cloth in the atrium was made of what few curtains had remained hanging up over the windows, the few sheets and blankets that had remained after the exodus of the house's previous tenants (or at least, those that hadn't been completely destroyed by the rodent population) tapestries that hadn't been looted, and the various other towels, napkins and those few clothes that she'd found around the place. She sorted out the tapestries immediately, knowing that those would take special handling. The rest she sorted into piles of like colors just as the elven laundry-maids she'd talked with had told her to do.

Varrics ball of yarn wasn't near strong enough (or long enough) for the task of acting as a laundry-line, but Merrill had thought ahead and bought a few rolls of thick, sturdy plain hempen rope from the market for the purpose. Merrill went out into the courtyard proper for the first time rather than just glancing at it through the kitchen window.

 _:Well, I might not be a connoisseur of city houses, but I surely know a **ruin** when I see one!:_ Merrill thought of the inner courtyard.

There was what had once been a small pond with a little decorative fountain flowing into it nestled against the back corner of the courtyard. The pool was mostly dried up and filled with putrid, slimy green muck and the pair of decorative fountain-spouts were not working. The walls around the courtyard were cracked and crumbling in places and there was parasitic greenery growing all over them. The grounds themselves were covered in a carpet of weeds and dead grass that had been allowed to grow wild. There was a long pergola just to the fore of the cvered patio that had been erected to shelter a small seating area (presumably for parties) and some octogonal... _thing_ Merrill wasn't certain the purpose of.

:Perhaps a table of some sort,: she mused, looking at it and trying to divine its purpose.

The octogonal shaped thing was wide as a large table, but it had straight sides and a flat top with what looked like acrease going down the middle, and three stone steps at the bottom.

The pergola was covered in overgrown vines and the outside furniture under it was home to pests... or had been until Merrill had evicted them all. Even the kitchen garden tucked away near the back door was shriveled from neglect. Last at the very opposite wall of the garden was some strange formation of little shrubbish- hedges all grown in a neatly arranged maze pattern that came to knee height, and interspersed along the little paths were several crumbled down and broken statues, or marble pillars with whatever had been placed on them stolen away.

 _:No way am I going to reign all of this in in a day!:_ Merrill thought. _:Best to just start all over.:_

She'd turn all of the plants to ash which she would then use to nourish the plants she planned to grow in it's place, medicinal nurturing, non-parasitic plants. Then she reconsidered, looking at the vines growing all over everything.

_:On second thought, I can get rid of them all tomorrow. There's no reason why I can't make use of those vines today.:_

Merrill used her Dalish Nature magic to call the vines to her command, and pushed them to grow and rearrange themselves in a criss-cross pattern from the top of the wall to the top of the pergola, twining together to give them extra strength and anchor to hold up the laundry she intended to weight them down with.

There was a table made of sturdy wrought iron on the covered patio (tucked underneath the upper floor balcony) and matching chairs, but the set that had sat next to the strange octogonal table-like thing that Merrill would need to investigate first was ruined beyond repair. Merrill expediently turned it to ash to get it out from underfoot.

 _:Let's see what that strange table-like thing is...:_ she thought to herself, going to have a closer look at the octagonal-shaped table-like thing on the left side of the pergola. The altar-like thing was surrounded by three stone steps on all sides and the sides were made of smooth mage-shaped stone that shot up from the ground until just below waist height from the top step.

 _:It has some sort of lid covering to top of it!:_ Merrill realized in puzzlement.

She'd recognized it for a lid only because it was strangely hinged in the middle. Curious, she put her hands under the lip of the tabletop-like lid and pulled up on it, breaking the seal with a wet sucking sound.

"Oh. _Ew_..." was her only reaction to the utterly disgusting, putrid soup of mold, algae, animal droppings and Creators only knew what else that lay underneath the lid. Experience from the first time had taught her to hold her breath before she went investigating sealed mysteries, so she was saved from having to smell the vile substance and was more than glad that she was working outside.

 _:I really don't know what I was expecting, but everything else in this place is filthy so why would this be any different,:_ she wondered to herself as she expediently began to evaporate the water right out of the primordial soup that had been created on the insides of the... whatever it was.

"I wouldn't go near that if I were you," Fenris called over to her, utterly unnecessarily.

" _Great_ timing," Merrill called back, still evaporating away the water to take the worst of the problem out of the tank of nastiness.

It had been only half full to begin with, and with concentrated casting Merrill had it down to a quarter full in only a few minutes. It was when the primordial soup started concentrating as the water went away that things got tricky. When it was sludge in the bottom Merrill discovered that there was a carved-out dip in the bottom of the thing that was filled with ember stones!

"What could they possibly be thinking to put those in there, I wonder," Merrill thought aloud in mystification.

If the thing had been filled with water though, and they used the emberstones to heat it...

_:Ah! I think I know what it is!:_

"Hey Fenris!" Merrill called back happily, pleased with herself for having figured out what it must have been.

"I think this is a laundry-tub!"

"Oh you do, do you?" he asked dryly, his own smug tone telling er that he knew something she didn't.

"Well it only makes sense," she replied, feeling a bit miffed with his superior tone. "With all of the water inside, and those emberstones in the bottom to heat it, they must have used it to do all the ridiculous amounts of laundry in this place!"

"Well you're wrong, but only because you're a little too practical," he allowed.

He went on in a smug, teacherly tone, pointing to the object that Merrill was trying to find a way to clean.

"This is a soaking tub," he elucidated. "The very wealthy have them in their gardens for when they entertain. Sometimes their guests like to soak in the hot water together, they find the activity enjoyable, rather like the public baths in Tevinter."

"Oh," Merrill said, impressed by his sagacity of the ways of the city-dwellers. "Wait... why would they have this tub down here for washing off in when they already have that tub in the tile room that does the same thing?"

"The stones and the materials to make the tub itself are near-ruinously expensive, and can only be formed by a mage. So having and being able to maintain a soaking tub purely for pleasure it is a mark of prestige, saying that they do not worry about the cost of such things and have the means to keep up such a ridiculously expensive thing."

"I think it would have made more sense if they'd let their servants use it to wash laundry," Merrill replied.

"They send out to have their laundry washed," Fenris pointed out. "They've the wealth to do so after all."

Merrill brightened abruptly with the thought that, rather than having to spend the day hauling load after load of sopping wet, heavy laundry to and from the kitchen all day long, she could just clean out the soaking tub. She'd just repair those emberstones and wash it all in the courtyard where she could dry it without having to carry it in and out of the house!

"Well _I'm_ going to use it to do the laundry," Merrill said. "Provided I can get it washed out."

Fenris peered down fromhis perch on the balcony, looking dubiously at the nasty green much and clearly sharing her reservations about getting the thing back into a state that remotely resembled cleanliness. Fortunately for her, a good look at the shaped stone of the inside of the tub revealed that it was shaped by a master mage who had made the insides smooth as glass without a single crack of flaw in it. that meant it was going to be easy to clean once she got the sludge out. She knew a way to do it too.

With a grimace of disgust, Merrill held her breath and reached a hand down into the thick, gooey disgusting slime of mold, algae and other nasties that had germinated in the perfect enclosed biome of the sealed soaking tub. She pulled out all of the emberstones from the little heating pit in the bottom of the tub by hand and felt around to make sure she'd gotten them all.

Merrill closed her eyes, summoned her magic, and

"What are you--" Fenris asked.

Merrill gestured to the pile of sludge that was still mostly water and with a twist of her magic changed the state of the substance from liquid to solid, the enegy slowing and bonds snapping into place in their crystalline structure like soldiers coming to attention. She sent a small force-spell down, just enough to shatter the ice into manageable chunks, then hopped in and started pulling up the green ice and lobbing the chunks into a bucket for her to figure out how to deal with later. Once she had the ice out of the way, all that remained was washing down the sides, and she had plenty of practice with that already so far.

Fenris stood nearby with his arms crossed looking displeased and he looked even less happy when she rolled over a barrel of clean water, heated it to steaming hot with magic, then began her little water-blaster spout trick. She sprayed the glassy sides of the tub clean with a hard stream of water that could have knocked a parson over, then swirled around the the insides to clear off the worst of the fungus and other forms of life that had created their own habitat in the congenial conditions of the enclosed soaking tub. Rather than evaporate away the water to leave behind a dry pile of dust, Merrill manipulated the water to carry away all of the dirt it had collected and pushed it back into the barrel, then heated another barrel and added the soap to clean it for real this time. She repeated her water spraying trick then attacked it with the bristled brushes, scouring the insides of the tub with a little army of scrubbers.

"I suppose that simply washing things by hand is too much for you," Fenris snarked. "Wouldn't want to get our precious little mage-hands dirty..."

Merrill eyebrow quirked in irritation at the commentary. If he knew how difficult to was to manipulate that many small objects without sending one of them through a wall by accident, he wouldn't be so quick to make smart comments! Because it took so much concentration however, Merrill was saved from having to reply. She was sorely tempted to accidentally throw one of the brushes at his head. Sorely tempted.

_:There! That's clean enough to eat off, I should think!:_

With the interior of the tub scoured out to her exacting standards, Merrill rinsed with another barrel of water and pulled out the whole soapy mass, leaving behind a glassy stone tub that was so shiny she could see her reflection in it. Next she dunked the emberstones one by one in a bucket of soapy water. Those she _did_ wash by hand because it was much easier that way. Once they were all clean, she recharged them and set them back down into the center of the soaking tub.

"Now comes the hard part," Merrill told Fenris. "Filling that tub and washing everything."

Fenris simply sniffed, unimpressed. Merrill was past caring if he was impressed or not, he didn't have to stand there watching if he didn't like it. She went into the house and collected the barrels from where she'd left them in front of all of the rooms and hauled them all down to the kitchen.

 _:I'm half tempted to necromance those corpses of his that I've mummified to keep from stinking everywhere and make them stat helping me haul the water!:_ Merrill thought with an impish sense of mischief.

Imagine the look on his face! But no, she had a personal rule against calling up helpless Spirits from the Fade and sticking them in dead bodies, it was rude and thoughtless and it probably hurt those poor Spirits to wake up in such an awful place and not be able to leave.

 _:And I'd never hear the end of it from Fenris if I did,:_ she added to herself as she methodically filled each barrel from the tap in the kitchen and sealed them so she could simply roll them outside rather than have to lift them.

Once the barrels were filled and brought out to the yard, Merrill began to fill the soaking tub she had appropriated to wash her laundry in by lifting them to the edge of the tub, tipping them over and water into the tub. They were simply too heavy for her to lift by hand.

"You could do all of this by hand you know," he said. "There's no need for this profligate use of magic for every little thing."

"Well when I grow muscles like _you_ Fenris, I'll let you know. Until then why don't you help out instead of making comments?" she said holding onto her temper by dint of long practice with the irritating male.

"You're the one who wanted to wash laundry," he said.

Merrill wanted to tip the barrel she was lifting right over his head.

_:Must resist temptation...:_

It took a lot of barrels, and Merrill was more than ready for a break by the time she was done filling the tub most of the way. She activated the emberstones to help heat the water and tossed in a few cakes of good bespelled laundry soap, then went into the kitchen to make an early lunch. Food was one of the best ways to keep her energy up. She sliced open a roll, put some cheese and onion on it and lamented that she'd not bought any hard sausage to go with it. She ladled out a bowl of the near ever-present soup and poured herself a cup of tea.

 _:It's a pleasant day, there's no reason why I shouldn't take this outside to enjoy,:_ she thought to herself.

Like many days in Kirkwall, the sun was bright and the seawinds kept the temperature moderate so when she sat down at the wrought iron table the weather was very agreeable. Fenris eyed her sandwich and soup and Merrill pointed to the kitchen if he wanted to get one for himself, though she couldn't imagine why since he hadn't done any work that morning.

Once lunch was done, Merrill began hauling piles of laundry from the large room inside of the house to the covered patio looking out onto the courtyard. There were seven large piles, not including the pile of tapestries which were going to require careful handling.

 _:I hope there's enough line to hang them all,:_ she fretted.

She also needed a rinsing tub. Merrill eyed the mostly dried up fountain pool in the corner and, since the washing tub needed more time to heat up the water Merrill took one of the still-full barrels, some soap and a few scrub brushes and went to work. The result was a barrel full of water so dirty that it was black, a scoured out fountain and pipes that had been cleared of muck and detritus and could start spouting water again.

"Fenris..." she asked, sighting a curiosity. "If there's water spouting from the fountains all of the time, why doesn't the fountain ever get full and overflow?"

She'd always wondered.

"Because, mage," he explained with superior belabored patience. "They pull the water up from the basin of the fountain itself and pour it out of the spout so it only _looks_ like it's flowing from somewhere else. It's really just cycling around."

"Oh. Well how do they get it to push up and then spout out?"

"They use dwarven pumps, just like you've seen in the house."

Merrill looked at the fountain-pool speculatively. The one annoying thing about rinse water was that it got soapy the more clothes were rinsed into it so it was constantly having to be diluted and replaced to keep from having overly soapy laundry.

 _:If I use this fountain's water-cycling system and put a spell on the spout so that it pulls out the soap when it cycles the rinse water, I won't have to keep bailing out and pouring new,:_ she calculated.

The thought was mother to the deed and she set the spell on the spouts, filled up the basin with fresh, clean water and gave the pumps a little magical push to get them working again. Whatever dwarf had designed the mechanisms that went into that house had really done his work well, even after so long a time of neglect they still worked just fine with a little cleaning and care.

Merrill looked back over at the washing tub, and the water was steaming now, so she pulled the nearest pile of laundry over and dumped it in, stirring it round vigorously with a paddle and making sure the the dirt and dust that had settled into the fabric was agitated enough that the bespelled soap could so its work while it soaked. Merrill would only be required to scrub at the most stubborn stains after it had soaked.

With the first load of laundry soaking to get clean Merrill turned her attention to the rest of the yard. The grounds were hard-packed dirt that surely was not good for growing anything but the most stubborn weeds, and said stubborn weeds were all that was growing there currently. The once carefully tended hedge maze was dead. It was best to simply erase it all and start over.

Merrill sank her magic into the tough, hardy but ultimately detrimental plants and started to dissolve them into ash. It was a little sad to watch the green plants turn grey and start to crumble and flake away, but Marethari had once told her that sometimes forest and grass fires could be a good thing as they got rid of all of the thick underbrush that crowded and choked the life out of the other plants. Sometimes nature needed to reset itself to grow back healthier than before. She'd saved all of the ash and the organic mulch she'd made earlier with the intent of working in the garden and when all of the thick weedy grasses and all of the hedges including their roots had disintegrated, Merrill began on the next part, which was turning over the hard-packed, nutrient-leeched soil.

She sometimes felt a little bit sorry for the shemlen for being so afraid of magic all of the time. It could be very useful. She still maintained that fear made people more dangerous than magic ever could.

The shemlen relied on horses, oxen and a big wheeled contraption that they pulled along behind the beasts called a plough to break up the soil and turn it over so that they could plant things. The Dalish had Keepers who knew where and how to plant things in the wild, but Merrill was kind of neither fish nor fowl; she only had a limited space to work in. Fortunately, being as she had an eclectic collection of knowledge, she had access to unique solutions.

The Dalish might openly shun blood magic, but that didn't mean that they were above tampering with nature to achieve a desired result. The shemlen might be inordinately proud of their breeds of dogs and cattle and horses they'd manipulated for certain desired traits over the course of generations or their strains of fancy roses with special names... but they were _centuries_ behind the Dalish when it came to modifying an organism toward a result!

To start with The Dalish knew that a codex-lattice was what passed down all of the traits from one generation to the next, and that that codex could be manipulated with the right kind of magic. For another thing, the Dalish knew the secrets or inter-cropping, which was the practice of growing several plants within an area all together so that there was little to no soil depletion and many types of plants could be grown instead of just one. The Dalish Keepers also liked to crossbreed similar plants for a hardier or more useful variant in the next generation. Some Keepers were renowned for their plant-crossbreeding skills. There were certain seed recipes that were so useful that the Dalish passed them down as general knowledge among their Keepers, and there were certain combinations of plants that were considered a sort of cannon for a Keeper's plot if the clan ever settled for any length of time.

Merrill knew all of those handed-down recipes for seed-codex manipulation, but she'd wanted to develop her own strain of plants for some time now as she'd found a number of old texts that addressed similar matters and it had given her some inspiration on a few variations to try out.

_:But first, i need to make this dead ground ready to plant. Elgar'nan! Just look at this! It's a wonder even weeds could grow here this stuff's so hard-packed and dead.:_

There were spots on the former lawn that even the weeds had given up on. Merrill took out a sharpened, pointy bit of stone the size of two of her fists put together. it was shaped a little like a fish fin, being tall and narrow, but it was sharpened all along the leading edge. She concentrated her stonefist spell into the little plow and used her magic to force it into the ground until only the top of it poked out, like a shark-fin out of water. She then pushed it in a long scraping path across the garden part of the courtyard; back and forth, and back and forth. It was hard work for her. The soil was packed down nearly as hard as stone and it didn't wish to break apart for anything, so Merrill had to expend a lot of magical strength to push the plow-stone through the cement-like dirt and get it to turn over. By the time she'd managed to till the garden plot filled neat lines of dirt (it wasn't soil yet!) she was sweating and in need of a drink and some lyrium potion.

 _:I think that first load should be about done soaking, and Keeper Marethari always said that a change is as good as a rest,:_ Merrill thought.

After a short break she walked over to the soaking tub that was currently soaking the laundry and stirred round the contents, checking it to see whether it was ready to scrub and rinse or whether it still needed more time to soak.

 _:Looks clean to me...:_ Merrill thought.

That batch of linens were all while (or close to it) so she simply examined each article as she pulled the heavy thing up from the water to see if there was one that needed scrubbing, but it seemed that the soap had done its work well, and Merrill had a reprieve (of sorts). She still pulled and scrubbed each piece a bit to help pull out the last of the dirt in the soapy water, then she hauled the heavy wet things over to where she would wring them out.

She pulled the sheets and other things out piece by piece, each one soaked heavy with water, wadded them up haphazardly, and placed them all on a broad, flat paving stone about two feet on either side she'd found and scrubbed clean enough to eat from. Rather than try to wring them out by hand, which in volved laborious twisting and pulling, she took another matched flat paving stone and stonefist-lifted it over the laundry laden stone and pushed down with great force, squishing the wet laundry in between them. Water came gushing out the sides, being pushed out from the wet clothes. After a moment, Merrill moved aside the top stone and pulled up the still sudsy, soap-laden laundry to carry to the rinsing pool where she had another set of two stones to squeeze out the water before she hung it to dry.

"Such a task!" Merrill said, regretting it already as she dunked and pulled, dunked and pulled, dunked and pulled to rinse the soap and the last remnants of dirt from the clean laundry. She was panting and sweaty by the time she was done.

"I can't believe some gel's do this fer a living!" she exclaimed to herself. "So much work!"

Granted, wielding magic had its own share of work and toil, but Merrill was accustomed to that sort. The sheer physical exertion of hauling all of that heavy water-soaked cloth and pulling and scrubbing and whatnot was more exhausting than a day of casting with blood augmentation. She felt a new admiration for all of the laundry-girls in the Alienage who took in washing... they must have a lot of muscle to do such labor.

She wrung out each piece between the stones and hung the wide panels of cloth out on the vine-lines that stretched across the yard to dry in the sun. It was a homely task, but she felt better about it. There was something oddly soothing in the work.

 _:I'll have to hold off on stirring up the dirt until all the laundry is dried,:_ she thought as she used a spell to carefully cleanse the dirt from the wash water in preparation for the next batch of laundry.

Fenris was still watching her like a suspicious hawk. It was clear he didn't like the magic being run about his home, even when it was obvious what she was using the magic for. Merrill ignored him, pretending that he hadn't come home the night before and she was free to go about her business without considering him. She dumped in the next load of laundry, stirred and agitated it in preparation for a good long soak.

_:Since I can't do anything more in the yard without risking getting dirty all of that laundry I just cleaned, I still have all of those empty wine bottles gathered in the kitchen I mean to wash and re-use.:_

Merrill took a moment to appreciate the sight of lines of white linens flapping briskly in the breeze and carrying the clean scent of soap and cloth with them. Then she turned toward the backdoor of the kitchen that opened out on the kitchen garden and headed inside to start on the bottles.

 _:My hands are already starting to get pruney,:_ she thought looking down at them.

She shrugged and poured a deep sink full of hot water and added in the soap then started transferring empty wine bottles over next to where she would wash them. She'd found an ingenious little bristled device on the end of a long narrow switch that would work perfectly for getting the sticky, dust-mixed remains of the bottles previous contents out from. Most considered empty bottles to be worthless, but most elves liked to re-use them, especially the wine bottles, as they were very good for holding medicines due to thier dark colors not letting through sunlight to ruin tinctures and concentrates easily. Merrill had discovered to her surprise and delight that one of the rooms she'd thought had been nothing more than another broom closet off the kitchen was actually a small stillroom for preparing simple medicines.

 _:Just look at this pile!:_ Merrill thought to herself when she surveyed all of the empty wine bottles that were still intact (she had discovered several of them had been shattered against walls and fireplaces, some of them still with the contents inside which just seemed wasteful!).

 _:I hope Fenris didn't drink all of these, otherwise I fear for the state of his liver!:_ she thought to herself, setting in the first lot of bottles in the hot soapy water to soak.

While the bottled soaked to loosen the gritty contents she treated herself to another break with some food. Washing dishes didn't take anything in the way of magic, as it was an easier task to do by hand. She'd let her magic have a rest for a while, she'd worked her abilities fairly hard (or at least consistently) over the last few days. On one hand, it felt good to stretch her abilities without having to fear anyone remarking on it, on the other hand, using it so often and to such a degree was tiring.

The first lot was cleaned and she was halfway through the second lot when she judged it was time to check the laundry again. The cloth in the soaking tub looked like it was going to need actual scrubbing before she could take it to rinse, so Merrill picked through garment by garment, pulling the ones that were clean enough not to need extra attention aside and stone-squeezing out the water before she simply put them in the rinsing water. The clothes that needed scrubbing she rasped against a washboard over and over until the stubborn stains came out. It was excersize more vigorous than she'd have liked, but she did eventually get them clean, wrung out and sent over to the rinse. She sloshed about in the cool rinse water for a while, mostly to rinse all of the soap and dust from the clothes, but partly because it was getting hotter in the day and she'd been sweating away in hot hot water for most of it. The lot was wrung and then hung on the vine-lines to dry in the sun and Merrill carried the next load of them over to the soaking tub to dry.

That was when she noticed that Fenris was not where she'd left him.

 _:I wonder where he's gotten himself to,:_ she thought curiously.

He wasn't drinking at least, she knew that because she'd been washing in the kitchen and she'd have seen him if he would have gone down to the cellar for another bottle. She almost went looking for him to satisfy her curiosity but decided against it, there was no need to antagonize him by appearing to invade his privacy. As long as he wasn't making a mess somewhere she didn't much care what he did.

Once the next lot of washing was in the tub and soaking, Merrill turned back to her tub full of bottles and started scrubbing again, wishing that there were a way to use magic to make the chore less tiresome. When she finished that load, Merrill's feet were beginning to ache from all the standing, so she gave herself another little break with another snack.

_:It's a good thing that using magic takes up so much energy and that elves are naturally slender, if I kept this snacking up regularly you'd have to roll me around sideways!:_

Her hands were too pruney, so Merrill decided to let the next batch of bottles soak in the new round of hot soapy water she'd drawn for them as the old lot was getting toward lukewarm and there was a significant amount of dirt in it from the cleaning already. She wandered out into the main atrium to see about getting to work on those tapestries when she found where Fenris had taken himself off to.

Merrill paused at the doorway, partly in surprise, and partly to admire the view, for Fenris was in the middle of the now-clean atrium with a weighted practice sword, going through sword-dancing maneuvers not unlike the sword-forms still practiced and passed down by the few Emerald Knights that remained. He had his shirt off and his lyrium markings gleamed like cats-eyes in the light streaming down from the cleaned skylights. His movements were very precise, very controlled; there was no wasted movement and one got the feeling that he was perfectly aware of his surroundings and of his next move.

She hadn't ever really thought of him as particularly graceful, oh he wasn't clumsy like _she_ was, but she hadn't given a whole lot of thought to the sort of practice and coordination it must take to be as good as he was at his weapons and skills. He'd had to have been born with a natural talent that he had honed to razor sharpness through practice and the same will he seemed to put to anything that kept him alive and free. Merrill hadn't considered it odd at all to think that there was no enemy she'd ever encountered that got by him in a one-to-one encounter, it was only when they showed up in more numbers than he could easily manage that there was any risk that someone in the back ranks would face a foe. She realized now that that fact was no accident, but the result of his rigorous training to keep himself in top fighting trim.

"Did you want something witch, or must you stand there and stare all day?" he demanded, not breaking his routine in the least.

"I came to have a look at that pile of tapestries, Fenris," Merrill replied walking through his workspace to pick up the heavy, dusty pile of embroidered wall-rugs an carry it away.

She debated the best place to work on cleaning the tapestries, for she knew that she couldn't use water on them, they were too delicate to trust with soap and water which might cause the colors to run and ruin them. She was going to have to clean them using magic. She'd just cleaned the kitchen and she ate there so she didn't want it getting dusty. If she took them outside to clean they might get dirt on her nice, clean laundry.

 _:I'll just use one of the other empty rooms then,:_ she decided. _:Creators know there's plenty enough of those in this house.:_

Merrill settled upon the long room with the long table that had once been used for eating in (imagine a whole room just for eating in!) as it had a large fireplace that took up nearly the entirety of one wall. She tied up cords to the corners of the tapestry and hooked the ends to the inside of the fireplace under the mantle, stretching it out by the reinforced rings in the tapestries corners. She shook it out first, then beat at it with a broom to loosen out much of the dirt that had accumulated in the fabric over the years. Great clouds of dust came roiling out of the fabric making her pause her work to get over a sneezing attack and watery eyes. She beat and beat and beat at the heavy wall-rug with her broom, putting all of her strength into it. Once she was satisfied she'd loosened all she could by hand, she sank her magic into the fibers, using a spell to loosen and pull out all of the dust and dirt particles. She went slowly, insinuating her spell deep into the fibers and gently pulling out the dust, traveling from the top down. Dirt rained down into the hearth and Merrill had to pause her work several times to deal with sneezing and watery eyes before she got the entirely sensible idea to use the handkerchief around her neck to help filter out the dust so she wasn't breathing it in.

 _:With all of the lead paint and arsenic they put on their walls, I'd better not breathe it in!_ : she thought to herself.

The last thing she wanted right then was lead poisoning from doing someone a favor. The process of cleaning the inner fibers of the tapestries by magic was long and intense because it required more concentration to manipulate magic on the very small than it did to just toss around the very large. Merrill had a lot of practice in the art of cleansing so it wasn't as difficult a task for her as it might have been for others. In an hour the first tapestry was done, and Merrill could actually see the picture it depicted not that it wasn't faded and covered with dust.

It was a colorful work once the dirt was taken from it, and featured several humans doing what looked like a very strange dance with no clothes on, or at least she guessed they might be doing a dance... she couldn't imagine what other activity might involve such strange contortions of the body and so many people involved. Several humans appeared to be playing a game of leapfrog in the background, she'd thought they only played that game among the Dalish! All in all it looked like a fun party, and Merrill might have like to join in a festival like that.

_:Maybe Fenris will like it, though he doesn't seem the type to enjoy dancing much.:_

Merrill left it hanging up, then went to check on her next round of laundry. It was another sweaty session of scrubbing and wringing and rinsing and wringing before she had that lot up to dry on the vines. By now the laundry covered three quarters of the airspace above the courtyard. She had four more loads left to go.

 _:Better see if that first load's ready to be pulled down and folded yet,:_ she thought. _:Otherwise I won't have room for the next.:_

The first load was dry after all, so Merrill carefully pulled it down and brought it into the house to fold. Folding the large bed linens really was a two-person job, otherwise she would just spend a lot of unnecessary time and energy running back and forth getting all of the corners lined up.

 _:Well it is his laundry, he can help this much,:_ Merrill decided and went to go look for Fenris.

She'd have liked to ask Pontius to help, but she was wary of waking Fenris' ire with her just yet. His temper could be a fearsome thing once roused.

 _:This house is too big!:_ she decided a few minutes later as she went up the stairs and down the stairs, poking into all of the damned rooms she'd just cleaned looking for Fenris.

:I should just ask Lucien,: she reprimanded herself, but only after she'd found him at last in the former Lady's sitting room, the one with the floor she'd had to replace.

He was standing on the steel-glass panels looking down through his feet and clearly gingerly testing his weight on it.

"It's perfectly safe," Merrill assured him. "Those panels can hold whole loads of bricks on them without cracking, and that's even without the net of ironbark-vine cables to support it. You could probably host a dancing contest with every noble in Hightown and it wouldn't show any strain."

Fenris looked up at her dubiously.

"You replaced the floor in this room with the magical abomination against the laws of nature... _why_?" he demanded.

"If I had left that rotted floor there, you'd have put just one toe on it and gone straight through it Fenris," she replied. "I didn't have the material for a normal floor so I had to work with what I did have. That's not why I'm here. I need your help with something, just very quickly. If you would. Please."

"The mage said please," he noted dryly.

"I _do_ know common courtesy Fenris," Merrill said silkily, allowing her voice to trailoff and imply that he did not.

Fenris scowled at her for her reply, easily catching the implication that he was unmannerly, and said

"What is it that you require, witch?"

She really should get on him about using her name, this dehumanizing 'witch' thing was long past getting old.

"I would just like an extra pair of hands to help me fold the laundry. The large linens are really a two-person job."

"I see," he said, making like he was mulling it over.

Merrill sighed and crossed her arms impatiently. She was _not_ going to bribe him for his help, she was already doing him a favor.

"Very well," he decided at last. "You did beg for my aid after all."

Merrill restrained a disgusted noise and walked out. When she returned to the impromptu laundry room where the linens were piled up on a nearby table in a big, fluffy mound waiting to be folded, Fenris was half a step behind her. She walked straight over to the linens to start the task but Fenris seemed to be stuck in the doorway, staring at the tapestry she'd just cleaned off.

"It's lovely isn't it?" Merrill chirped. "It was so dirty before that you couldn't even tell what it was, but now all the colors show through so bright and cheerful."

Fenris made a strangled noise in his throat.

"Though I do wonder what kind of dancing-party it is," she went on. "Where half the guests look like they're in some sort of pain. I suppose no-one must've told them to stretch out before doing that kind of exercise."

Fenris snorted, looking distinctly, _superiorly_ amused about something.

"A dancing-party? Is that what you think is going on?" he questioned.

"Well what else could it be?" she asked a bit exasperated with his tone. "I suppose they might be all stretching out, but that doesn't explain the game of leapfrog."

"They are not dancing witch," he said condescendingly. "They are all having sex."

Merrill looked at him, flatly disbelieving him.

"Nonsense," she scoffed. "I admit I'm no expert, but seeing as no-one looks like they're having any fun at all, I'm pretty sure that's the wrong way to go about it."

For the first time in the ten years that Merrill had known him, she watched in amazement as he burst into laughter. She'd never seen him laugh before. She wasn't certain what it was that she'd said that he found so funny, but she was pleased to see that he was laughing. Maybe some of that laughter would chase away some of the snippy, rude and mean parts of his personality and make him more agreeable to be around... but she wasn't going to hold her breath while she waited.

He did manage to fold the laundry with her with a minimum of fussing. Despite the fact that she was certain that animals had used a number of the linens for nesting in over the years, the cloth was all still in excellent shape. The former owner must have paid well for fine, high-quality linen that could withstand the test of time, even a decade of abuse and misuse had done almost nothing to degrade a number of the sheets. Now that they were clean they could be spread back on the single bed to have made it through the occupation by bandits and squatters before Fenris had taken the place over.

"Ma seranas," she thanked him once they had finished.

Fenris pointedly pulled down the tapestry she'd just finished cleaning and gestured to her that she should help him roll it up.

"I take it this means you don't plan to display it then?" she asked him.

He narrowed his eyes at her for her little joke so Merrill helped him roll it up and found a trunk in a closet to put it away in without saying a word further. Fenris went back to his explorations of the now cleaned mansion and Merrill put another tapestry up on the long hearth to start cleaning it. Another hour passed as she cleaned that tapestry from the fibers out. Then she went back outside and scrubbed the current load of laundry, checked the second batch to see if it was dry enough to pull down and fold (it wasn't) then rinsed and hung the fourth batch over the yard.

 _:Considering how big the tub is, these other two loads that I had separated out for size are similar enough in color they can go in one big load, since the tub is so large,:_ she decided in the interests of saving time.

She cleansed the water, topped it off with some fresh since it was getting low, then dumped in the fifth and sixth batch. She just had one more batch, most of those were decorative hangings, and she was done (not counting the tapestries she was cleaning by hand).

Merrill had found a large chest made of cedar for storing linens in in one of the empty rooms and put a few extra spells on it for warding away pests and dirt before she placed the first load in the chest. She went back to her tapestry cleaning, beating it out by hand then pulling out all the dust and dirt that she couldn't shake loose by magic.

The second tapestry depicted a scene with shemlen nobles hunting on horseback, chasing down garms, and tuskets and halla with spear and bows. Their elven servants waited back at camp with trays of delectables and goblets of wine for them. Merrill scowled at it, insulted on behalf of the elves. If those elves were _her_ clansmen, they'd have surely shown those shem a thing or two about bringing down game... or morelikely they'd have shot the shem instead for hunting halla in the first place. She rolled that one up and stuffed it alongside the naked sex-havers tapestry then moved on to the third tapestry out of five. She paused between the beating stage and the magic-cleansing stage to have another snack since it was hungry work. She was dismayed to discover that the dust and dirt had gotten mixed in with the sweat on her skin and she looked terribly dirty. She'd definitely have to have a wash that night!

 _:Perhaps after all of the laundry is done I'll rinse out and refill the soaking tub for a good soak,:_ she thought.

The thought did give her some incentive to see the whole chore done that day instead of putting some of it off until the morrow. She looked over and realized that in the course of cleaning the tapestries she'd left the last load of bottles in the sink still unwashed. Merrill cleaned out the bottles in the now tepid sink of water then moved them over to the drying rack and drained the sink. She went back to the tapestry and continued to clean it from the fibers out then swept the enormous pile of dust that fell out of the bottom right into the hearth.

The third tapestry depicted a number of women sitting over looms and rolls of fabric embroidering things, while men sat ext to a hearth with some dogs and there was a table nearby piled high with things to eat and a number of children in the next room over studying from books under the eye of another elf. Merrill supposed it was supposed to bring up nostalgic thoughts of comfort and home-like surroundings with family and prosperity as the central themes... but she didn't like how there were so many elven servants in the background serving this and cleaning that.

_:That one's going in the trunk too, where it will hopefully never again see the light of day!:_

Unless Fenris wanted to sell it. Merrill sort of had the impression that it was very well made, the picture was remarkably clear for having been stitched out in thread and the colors were still fairly bright even after all that time. It might fetch a goo price, but Merrill knew she was no judge of such things. She wondered why the previous owner had owned two tapestries of such wildly different themes. Merrill knew that shemlen tended to be very private about sex on the whole, preferring to act as though it didn't exist or was some kind of shameful secret never talked about. She didn't see why the previous owner would have one tapestry that was about an ordinary good life and another that depicted a lot of sex-having when Merrill had learned that most shemlen acted like the two activities had nothing to do with each other.

She shrugged and chalked it up to just one more mystery about shemlen and city life that was never going to make sense to her. Meanwhile, she hung up the fourth tapestry, but before she got around to beat out the dust, she went out to check on the sixth load of laundry in the soaking tub. She judged that it had soaked for long enough and she started scrubbing at the last stubborn stains to remain, then wrung them out between the stones and took them to the basin of rinse water and started the process of dunking and wringing, dunking and wringing to get the soap out of the cloth, then wrung each piece between two stones before she flicked it out and hung it up to dry, taking down the laundry that she found already dry on the line to fold while she was at it and rearranging the wet clothes so that there was more space for the next load.

:The sun's westering already, I hope the clothes all get dry before dark!: Merrill thought, looking at the sun to realize that most of the day had slipped away from her.

Merrill brought in the baskets of dried clothes and then hauled over the last and final load (at last!) to be tipped into the soaking tub, stirred around with a paddle and left to slowly get clean. The dry things she brought into the room she'd picked out for folding the clean laundry in (there were more than enough empty rooms in that little maze he called a residence) and she sorted them by size, picking out those she could fold on her own, and those she'd need help for. Merrill reluctantly went in search of Fenris and after another sweep of the house, going from room to room, she found him in the smaller bathing room upstairs examining the faucet at the sink.

"The handle on this one will not turn," he noted aloud to her.

"Oh, well I suppose you'd better not have any babies then Fenris, or they'll never have their own little bathtub to wash up in," Merrill replied, slightly ironically.

She'd figured out that the connecting rooms and the smaller sinks and tubs were meant for the previous tenants children, and that this smaller washroom was where their mother (or probably, their elven governess) had washed the young children in. He gave her another narrow look for her levity and Merrill politely asked for his help with folding the laundry again. He pretended to consider it again and she waited a bit impatiently and Fenris made certain to point out that she'd gone to such lengths to request his aid. Merrill considered using magic to fold the clothes, but she was fairly certain she'd end up accidentally ripping the cloth, fragile things should not be handled with magic.

"What is for dinner?" he asked abruptly on the way down and Merrill was half tempted to snap back a reply along the lines of whatever _he_ was making, but refrained and paused to think abut it for a moment. She'd need to look through the pantry to see what raw materials were left.

 _:I suppose I could just ask him what he wants, that way I won't have to hear him complain if he doesn't like it...:_ she thought reluctantly.

Though to be fair, the food she'd made was the one thing Fenris _hadn't_ complained about.

"What would you like for dinner Fenris?" Merrill asked as they began to fold the linens together.

"I... ah... there are pies that I have eaten once, from a shop," he said quickly. "They are made with meat and vegetables and filled with gravy and spices. It was... quite good."

Merrill thought about it, she knew a similar recipe so it should be fairly easy. She already had flour for the crust and the filling, she just needed the meat and the vegetables.

_:But I still have all this laundry to finish up. Well, Fenris did request it so **he** can run to the market and pick up the ingredients.:_

"I should be able to make it," Merrill said agreeably. "I'll just need you to run down to the common market and pick up the raw ingredients, I used up the last of the meat and vegetables in the soup earlier. Also, buy some eggs for breakfast if you want omlettes again, otherwise its just porridge and bread and the last of the bacon. There's a basket for carrying by the back door of the kitchen."

"Are you saying you wish for me to run and fetch, witch?" he inquired archly.

"I'm saying I'm already working, and if you want food you can help us both out by running to get the ingredients for it."

Merrill decided she'd try a little bit of flattery to see if it didn't sweeten his temper a bit.

"After all, you're _so_ much better at these city things than I am Fenris. _You_ surely wont get cheated out of your coin by the sellers in the stalls at the market."

"You've lived in the city for nearly a decade, you'd think you'd have learned how to manage your coin better," he replied, but he still looked smug around the edges.

"It still confuses me that I have to pay for things I need. Besides, you're much stronger than I am, and you can surely carry it all home in one trip," Merrill said, continuing to lay it on thick.

"Naturally," he replied proudly. "Is there anything else you require for the meal?"

"Oh... some apples too, if you can find them for a good price," Merrill added.

She could make little turnover pies with apples in them. She loved those!

"Anything else?" he asked with belabored patience. Merrill thought it over.

"You're almost out of butter so you might want to pick up another pat, mind you don't let them talk you into substituting it for grease... you'll regret it, trust me. You might think about buying some chicks to keep here, you could make a little pen for them and have eggs all of the time without having to go to the market for them. They'll eat your leftover rolls if you don't like day-old bread and feed for them is not expensive."

"You want me to fetch live poultry?" he asked disbelievingly.

"No, that was just a suggestion," Merrill said. "You'll just need the meat and veggies you want for in your pie for dinner, the eggs, the butter and apples if you can find them."

By that point they had finished the last of the linens that needed two people to fold them, so Merrill politely shooed him off while she went about folding the rest and wondered, as she watched him leave from the door with a basket over his arm and a sword across his back, if he was going to come back with the entire market. She had once heard two married women in the alienage jke with each other about their concerns when they sent thier husbands shopping instead of doing it themselves.

 _:It's none of my nevermind if he does,:_ Merrill shrugged. _:After all, he'll have to eat it all once I leave this place.:_

Merrill beat at the fourth rug for a while and then went out into the yard again to check to see if those things that had been damp last she'd checked were now all the way dry. They were and she pulled them in to fold them. It took much longer when it was only just her for the large things, but she managed and piled all of the linens into the warded storage chest then turned back to the tapestry. By then the cleansing was becoming routine and she was a bit more efficient at it, though by its nature it was not something that could be done quickly.

The fourth tapestry was another of those wealthy-persons-homelife scenes, with a large laughing family gathered around a table that seemed to extend for miles. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time and there was a lot of food piled on the table. There were children running around in the foreground and the adults were all laughing, there were musicians and juglers performing in the background. There were also more elven servants. Merrill rolled that one up with a frown and stuffed it away with the rest, then went out to scrub out the last load of laundry.

The colorful collection of cloth had the most stubborn stains on it and Merrill spent longer scrubbing it against the washboard than she had for the rest of the laundry piles combined. She wrung, rinsed wrung and hung and went back in to deal with the last tapestry for the day, hoping that the sun would not sink entirely before the clothes could dry.

 _:Well, I could just dry them by magic, but that's a bit more work than I really want to put into it,:_ she thought. _:I wonder where Fenris is, it's getting toward time for me to start thinking about preparing to cook dinner.:_

She shrugged and went back to the last tapestry, he'd get back when he got back. Merrill started to beat the ugly thing of its dust and then got to work pulling the dirt out from the fibers with magic. She was halfway through the task when she felt the wards trigger, letting her know that Fenris had come home. Merrill poked her head out of the doorway to greet him then immediately shrank back inside by reaction.

He looked frankly murderous. Merrill did not see what about shopping it was that could account for the look but he seemed to have been made very angry by something.

"Witch!" he barked a summons.

 _:Oh what does he want now?:_ Merrill wondered.

"Yes, Fenris, what is it?" she asked, emerging into the room where he looked like a miniature thundercloud.

"Don't play the innocent fool with me!" he snapped.

Merrill looked blankly back at him, wondering what had put a bee up his bum _that_ time.

"What are you on about?" she asked curiously.

Maybe he'd gotten picked on at the market, or maybe some bandit had robbed him of his coins. Then again, she didn't think that there were any bandits in these parts stupid enough to try it with Fenris, market-basket or no market-basket.

"I heard the stall-mongerers at the market talking," he said accusingly.

Merrill waited patiently for him to get to the point, unless the idea of people who worked in markets talking bothered him a great deal, there was probably more to the story.

"Did they pick on you for the market basket, Fenris?" she asked. "If you didn't like the ribbons on it, you could have just taken them off."

"They were not discussing the ribbons on the basket, witch," he snarled. "They were discussing _you_."

Merrill blinked at him in surprise.

"Me?" she asked, uncertain she'd heard him right. "What would they possibly have to say about me?"

She hadn't thought that the other elves were all that much aware of her, despite the fact she more or less practiced her craft openly. She didn't see what they might have to remark upon.

"The elves in the marketplace seem to think you've found a young man to live with, since you have not been back to the remains of your house in a week and were seen at the marketplace buying sundries."

"I've been cleaning here for a week," Merrill explained patiently. "And without magic, it would have taken a small army of maids and mops and carpenters to set this place right."

"You have been planning on living here all along," he accused. "Admit it! That whole gratitude thing was nothing but a ploy to gain the access you wanted. Bribing me with food and small comforts! You have no place among your own kind any more, and the Alienage elves have rightly wanted nothing to do with you, so you thought you'd inflict yourself on _me_."

Merrill felt a deep jab of genuine hurt at the accusation, especially as it was untrue and entirely unexpected. She hadn't expected to be thanked for her work, but she hadn't actually expected to be attacked and accused for it! Merrill treated him to the full effect of her most hurt and wounded expression, letting him look for himself and see that his words could and did hurt someone who, she felt, didn't deserve it.

"No, Fenris," she said, ignoring a tightening in her throat that he thought even _less_ of her than she'd given him credit for.

"I don't know when it was in the entire ten years you've known me that you've come up with the impression that I'm duplicitous. I'm certain I've never lied to you, even by omission because I do not lie. Keepers must have a reputation for honesty, you know, if their Clan is to trust them. I did come here and do this task with the intent of expressing gratitude, but I can see that it does not make you happy. You also clearly do not care for my presence here, so I'll leave now."

Merrill was half tempted to make a cutting remark about not inflicting herself on him anymore, but didn't want to create more discord when it seems she'd somehow inadvertently created enough. She set down the broom she was beating the last tapestry with and headed for the door. He could keep the cleaning supplies and the food, she was done with his foul temper!

"Don't forget to take in the washing on the line when it's dry!" she called back just before she shut the door firmly behind her.


	6. Chapter 6

Merrill settled into a brisk walk through the winding streets of Kirkwall, making her way landmark by landmark as it was the only way shed learned to make it from place to place in a city where everything looked all the same. The sun was going down and people were hurrying along the streets, hoping to make it back to their houses before dark when all of the gangs came out, (even in Hightown). The Alieange, or what was left of it, was all the way at the other end of the city.

She tried not to sniffle or cry with wounded feelings, telling herself that she shouldn't have expected anything else of the irascible elf as she walked quickly through the streets.

_:I honestly don't know what I was hoping for from him, it's as though I've been nothing more than an unwanted acquaintance to that man and I've known him by now for nearly as long as I've known members of my own Clan... back when i had a clan. You'd think he'd know me at least a little bit by now...:_

Her feelings were genuinely hurt, and her heart felt bruised. It was one thing for him to dislike her magic, but it was quite another for him to stand there and accuse her of having ulterior motives when she'd went to so much effort just to make him feel better and be more comfortable in his own home. She was so lost in her thoughts that she missed someone calling her name the first time.

"Merrill!" Aveline's voice called over with the sort of tone a person used when they'd called to her more than once and were annoyed with having been ignored.

Merrill turned to look over at the tall, red-haired Guard-Captain. She stood there haloed by the last of the golden sunlight with an expression on her face that was a cross between concern and impatience, and only steady, calm Aveline could make such a cross look natural. Merrill had always rather admired and envied the Guard-Captainher staid, strength, especially now when Merrill was all but blubbering and weeping in the streets.

"Oh, hullo Aveline," she sniffled, wiping a face that had become embarrassingly bedewed with tears she hadn't wanted to let fall in public.

"Is everything alright?" Aveline asked with concern. "I've been looking for you, you know, once I'd heard that the elves hadn't seen you in the Alienage in a few days."

"Oh... _thanks_ , Aveline," Merrill said, feeling genuinely touched by the gesture, especially after the latest encounter with Fenris had left her feelings so bruised. "That's very kind of you."

"You're crying," Aveline said with the stiff embarrassment of a person who was not overly good with emotions. "Did someone hurt you?"

"No, not really," Merrill tried to demur.

Not physically, anyway.

"Here, come with me," Aveline said firmly, taking her by the elbow and leaving no room for objection. "You can come to my house near the barracks. Donnic won't be back until after his shift's over, so that'll give us time to talk in private."

Merrill obediently followed Aveline through the Hightown streets to her cozy little house in a small, middling-level side-street near the guard barracks. The interior of the guarswoman's house was furnished sparely, but every furnishing had been chosen for comfort and utility. It was hard to tell that Aveline was Orlesian, her taste ran more towards Fereldan practicality. Still, the place did give off a comforting vibe, as a home that was meant to be lived in, and that had occupants who loved each other and had chosen their furnishings as a reflection of that. Merrill was seated at a well-maintained and refurbished table off the kitchen and given a tall mug of ale kept warm near the hearth.

"What happened?" Aveline asked.

The guard-captain had visibly tried to gentle her tone with Merrill, but it still came out sounding more like she was interrogating a prisoner. Merrill smiled a little bit in amusement, feeling worlds better already just by the act of Aveline's concern for her well-being and being taken in for a nice visit.

"It's nothing really," Merrill reassured her friend, gathering herself a bit and wiping away the last of her tears. "I mean, I probably _should_ have realized he'd bark and snap at me. He doesn't like me after all."

"What does Fenris have to do with anything?" Aveline said, the guard-captain in her was able to easily construe a lot from very few clues, and Merrill had always thought that she would have made a very fine Keeper if only she'd been born an elf.

"Well," Merrill said, taking a good long drink of the warmed ale that Aveline had given to her, and feeling it spread warmth all the way down through her insides. "I spent the last week or so over at Fenris' mansion, cleaning it up--"

"You did _what_?" Aveine asked sharply, looking over at her in astonishment.

"Oh yes, it's true," Merrill assured the guardswoman, who looked at her incredulously.

After another pull of the ale, Merrill was feeling warm and a bit tipsy since it had been a while since she'd eaten and she didn't drink very often.

"I cleaned the whole thing," Merrill added.

Aveline's eyes widened further.

"I patched up his roof," she continued with another pull of ale. "And washed down every last filthy, disgusting wall ceiling and floor in that place. I even replaced all of the glass."

"Truly?"

"Yes indeed! I didn't have any shingles so I used a weatherproofing mixture we elves use when we weatherproof the arravells. I also replaced all of those missing ceiling glass thingies."

"Where did you find glass in such quantities?" she asked, taking a moment to digest Merrill's claim. "It's ruinously expensive."

"I've been working on an eluvian for so many years," Merrill said with a pardonable bit of pride. "It hasn't been a total waste, I suppose. Oh, and all those cracked and missing tiles in all of the rooms are restored."

"You cleaned everything? Not just the room he took over?"

"Well, I cleaned everything _but_ the room he took over," Merrill corrected.

"The other rooms," Aveline said dubiously. "But those haven't been touched in nearly a decade and they were far from clean when he took up residence. I shudder to think what must have built up in them after all of this time. I'd say it was impossible for one person to handle alone in just a few days, but you've never been one to lie, so however did you do it?"

"It took a _lot_ of magic!" Merrill said, warmed once more at being trusted and believed. "I don't think that if you had gathered all the elves still left in the Alienage and armed them with scrub brushes and soap that they could have done it in anything less that two weeks, you know. It took _sooo_ much magic!"

"I don't think anything less than magic could clean it _at all_ ," Aveline muttered.

"The water's hooked back up, so be advised," Merrill added, just in case there was some sort of city-tax complication that Aveline was going to have to make go away. "I washed down that tiled room for bathing in, both of them. There were lots of things _growing_ on the walls."

Aveline shuddered.

"And...I cleaned that... that awful, smelly, _terrible_ kitchen of his."

"Maker on a mule, you went into the kitchen?!" Aveline exclaimed in disbelief. "I looked in there once out of curiosity and couldn't get out fast enough!"

"I've never seen anything like it, let me tell you," Merrill said with rare honesty.

"For a task like that, I hope he fell on his knees in gratitude," Aveline said almost leadingly, but Merrill was enjoying the slightly bitter, nutty, honey-taste of the warm ale and felt warm on the inside now due to both drink and company both.

"Oh hardly," Merrill replied, feelings still raw about the matter. "He was Fenris the whole way through."

"I can just imagine," Aveline muttered, a bit darkly. "We haven't always seen eye to eye you and me, Merrill, but I've never doubted your good-hearted intentions. He should be ashamed of himself for making you cry after you went to such effort to clean that awful place. There's few things better than a nice warm hearth to return to."

At the mention of the word hearth, Merrill's eyes widened in panic, for she suddenly remembered what had happened with Lucien, the Hearth Spirit. She'd been the one to conquer the magic in the hearthstone and make herself mistress of the house wards, so technically the house would recognize her as its mistress and not Fenris. Merrill had no idea how Poncy and Lucien would react to someone chasing off their putative new mistress.

"There's a... complication," Merrill said, looking frettingly over at Aveline.

She then related the story of her discovery of the master keystone in the hearth, and her assumption that it might have been some sort of magical booby-trap or something unpleasant left behind by the previous owner, so she'd set about disabling it and woke the house wards and the Spirit that tended them, and had inadvertently made herself the house's new mistress.

"And then there's Poncy," Merrill added to an already incredulous Aveline. "He's sort of an enormous walking suit of armor, there's no dead thing inside, I think it's like a golem or something, only there's a Spirit bound to it too. I offered to set them both free, but neither of them appear to want to leave, and they haven't hurt anything that I know of."

"So keying yourself to the wards officially transfers the title of ownership to that house of you?" Aveline asked, astonished.

"That's what Lucien told me," Merrill confirmed with a nod. "I found a whole packet of papers that say that the holder of the Master Key, that is, the one who's keyed in to the house wards, is the rightful owner of the property. All I have to do to claim full legal ownership, apparently, is show up at the city office with the Master Key."

"Well, actually, that's no bad thing," Aveline said after considering for a long moment.

"I hadn't wanted to bring it up with everything else going on, but there's been increasing pressure on the guard from the local nobility to "clear out the riffraff" so the state can put the mansion up for auction, and with Varric not here to pay out the bribes..." she left the sentence hanging.

"Oh... well that's good then," Merrill said. "I'll just make it all official, and Fenris can stay as long as he wants to. I don't know how the house will feel about his chasing me off, though."

They didn't have long to wait to find out either. There came a loud banging on the door. Instinct prompted the guardswoman to grab up her sword and shield, for the "knock" sounded less like a polite request for entry, and more like the person outside was a half a heartbeat away from fetching a battering ram.

"Fenris?" Aveline said in astonishment when she opened the door but she was shoved roughly aside.

The elf looked _murderous_. He had a split lip, and a bruise on one cheek and his armor was quite dusty. He certainly looked like he'd been in a fight, and it did not look like he'd been the victor!

"You!" he snarled, fade-stepping across the room before Merrill could do anything other that half-rise from her seat in surprise. His fist glowed blue and he drew his hand back, looking like he had every intention of ripping her lungs out right then and there. Merrill gasped and drew back in fear, trying to get away.

Suddenly Fenris was drenched in cold water. Merrill knew it was cold water, for a good deal of it splattered onto her. He froze, blinking in surprise like he didn't understand what had just happened. Merrill looked past the shoulder of the man who had apparently been just about to kill her, to see Aveline, still in the doorway, with an empty bucket in her hand. She must have reacted on instinct. The angry guardswoman crossed the room in a three purposeful strides, seemingly almost as fast as Fenris' fade-step had been. She grabbed his shoulder and his arm and twisted, hard.

"What, do you think you're doing?!" she demanded in her most firm and commanding tone.

Merrill had seen that look only once before, it had been on her Keeper Marethari's face shortly after she'd discovered a small plot by some of her younger clan members to go and cause trouble among some of the nearby humans for some fun. The lecture and punitive measures that had followed had been unusually harsh, especially for Marethari who was often gentle and forgiving with her young clansmen, but because they could have potentially endangered the clan she'd had to make certaint he lesson stuck.

"She performed some foul witchery at my house!" Fenris snarled and tried to escape her grasp and attack Merrill again.

"Well speaking of houses, this one is _mine_ ," Aveline replied. "Last I checked, a person doesn't just storm into another person's house and threaten their guests with murder, especially in front of the Captain of the Guard. Now sit down!"

Aveline forcibly sat him in the bench of the nearby table. Fenris looked rebellious as she let him go.

"Sit!" she barked.

Fenris sat, but looked mutinous.

"Now, let's talk about this like civilized people," she frowned. "What happened to you?"

" _The Witch_ ," he spat her name like an epithet. "Put up some foul magic... _thing_ in my house that emerged after she'd left and it seized me up. Every door in the house became locked to me and that demonic abomination she must have breathed undead life into with her vile blood magic put me out on the street."

Merrill blinked, almost unable to believe it. She'd seen Fenris fight before... he was not one who had ever been easy to defeat.

"Poncy just... beat you up?" Merrill said halfway torn between dismay, incredulity and titillated humor about the matter.

"He beat you up and threw you out?" she said, just to be certain.

The look he shot her could have felled dragons in midair.

Feeling bad for being the inadvertent cause of his sound beating, Merrill wetted a nearby cloth and tried to dab at one of the wounds on his face. The snarl he sent her way was like a wolfs, and it certainly threatened to take her hand off.

"I didn't have anything to do with Poncy tossing you out," she said, debating whether or not she should try for another dab or if he really would take her hand off.

"He's actually been living there longer than you have," she continued. "The previous owner made him to be some sort of magical, mechanical servant thing, and he's just been hiding in lain sight the whole time. His name is Pontius Tiberius Clemantius Benedictus Kumberbottom... The Third."

Aveline looked over at her and restrained a snort of laughter.

"What happened to the First and the Second?" she asked dryly.

"I don't know," Merrill replied honestly. "I didn't ask."

"Second," she went on, daringly bringing the cloth near for another dab. "The home shutting itself up... well, alright that is sort of my doing, but it wasn't on purpose..."

Fenris swiped at her. Merrill backed off.

"Maybe you'd better let me handle this Merrill," Aveline sighed, taking up the washcloth and the narrative both.

Aveline patiently explained how Merrill had discovered the house ward keystone in the hearth while she'd been cleaning and, fearing it was a booby trap, had set about disarming it, only to discover that her defeat of the spells in it had keyed her into the house wards and made her mistress of the mansion. Fenris opened his mouth to start in on Merrill and Aveline, having none, firmly shut it for him and forcibly told him how this was actually a good thing for him and that the nobles had wanted to kick him out and sell the property now that there were not more bribes forthcoming from House Tethras since Varric had taken off to the Temple of Sacred Ashes with Seeker Cassandra.

That gave him pause. He was silent for a long moment.

"Would you do it?" he asked her quietly, meaning would she kick him out of his house.

Aveline sighed again

"I wouldn't like it, and I'd try my hardest to get around it, but I am charged with upholding the law in this city and that building is property of the Viscount, or rather his Council until a new Viscount is found, so yes... I'd have had to evict you."

Fenris chewed on it for a few moments longer then turned to Merrill.

"I suppose _you_ must be pleased," he growled at her.

"With what?" she asked.

"You get to play mistress of the manse, naturally," he said bitterly.

"I'm Dalish, Fenris," Merrill reminded him. "I wouldn't know what to do with such a thing as a house, and certainly not one that size. You could hide three clans in that enormous pile of rocks and they'd never find each other! I suppose it's fine if I wanted to play hide and seek, but... I've no clan so there's no point."

Fenris studied her for a long moment.

"There's a library," he pointed out.

Merrill paused this time. She did like the library and it was terribly dusty and disorganized. Plus she couldn't really trust Fenris to treat Lucien and Poncy right, he'd just snarl and snap at them all day long.

"Ha!" he said triumphantly, clearly reading her thoughts.

"Oh knock it off!" Aveline cuffed him none to gently upside the head with her still gauntleted hand.

Fenris shot her a dirty look and the return look she gave him said she wasn't having any of it.

 _:Maybe I should learn to look like Aveline,:_ Merrill marveled. _:She has a Marethari Face to rival even my old Keepers.:_

Fenris certainly seemed to respect her, even when he was angry with her. Maybe the key to getting along with him was to be firm and stand her ground rather than just trying to be nice and gentle with him all of the time. Merrill couldn't really understand why Fenris would prefer someone to be mean rather than gentle...

 _:But if it works, I guess, why not try it?:_ she thought, deciding to take a gamble.

"Fenris," Merrill said in her best, most firmest tone, the one her Keeper had taught her how to use when there were recalcitrant littles to bring into line. "You might not like it, but this is the situation we have. Aveline's right about it maybe not being such a bad thing, all around. Since I'm keyed to the wards, I can claim the property from the City. I'll do that so no-one can kick you out."

"And in exchange?" he narrowed his eyes at her mistrustfully, but to her amazement he didn't insult her, snarl or snap at her.

"In exchange, since I've no-where else to go, I'll take up a little room of my own downstairs, the one off the kitchen should do fine," she said. "I'll have free run of the library, but... I'll make the meals so you don't have to buy any more of that awful slop from the Hanged Man."

He'd had his mouth open, obviously to refuse her, but the promise of the meals made him pause and he visibly reconsidered. Aveline tried to suppress a smile at the look of consideration on his face and he mentally weighed the pros and cons. Merrill was betting that on any other day the con of having Merrill anywhere near him would have outweighed any pro she could have thought of, but it seemed he'd really enjoyed her meals.

"Very well," he acceded, to her everlasting surprise. "But, I get to be written into the official city documents as a partial owner and the rightful successor should something happen to you."

"I'd advise against that Merrill," Aveline spoke up. "Given his most recent display of temper, he might arrange for an unfortunate accident to befall you."

Fenris shot Aveline a look of affront but she looked utterly unmoved by his tender bruised feelings and glanced pointedly at the bucket she'd used to forcibly cool him off so he didn't murder their mutual companion.

"And," Fenris continued as though Aveline hadn't made her comment on his violent tendencies. "If you are to co-habitate with me in my demesne, I don't want to be always tripping over you with you underfoot. You stay in your section, and I'll stay in mine."

"To the first, I can't," Merrill said. "In order to be the successor to the property you have to be able to key yourself in to the wards, which means you have to be able to wield magic. That's something in the documents that can't be changed, I read them myself."

Fenris' face registered disappointment but not surprise or disbelief.

"it was ever the way of succession among the imperium as well," he grumbled with a fatalistic shrug.

"To the second,"she said, meaning his rule that they should each keep to their own little sections. "Agreed, but that goes for you also... _and_ I want the garden."

"No," he said flatly.

"Why? You clearly never go out there," Merrill asked, feeling a bit stung by his selfish refusal.

"I have a balcony and I occasionally venture out for fresh air," he replied. "If you were always puttering about in it, I would know you're there, living with me."

"It's hard to avoid knowing," Merrill said. "You're going to have to come down for meals anyway. I'll tell you what, if you'll let me have the kitchen to make salves in, and the library to do research in, and the garden to grow my plants, you can have the whole rest of the house."

"You want the whole library, the kitchen _and_ the garden?" he asked archly. "Well look who's planning to move in! If you think you're bringing your foul magical work in with you, forget it!"

"I'm a mage Fenris, it does come with the territory. But I promise you that you won't have to worry about my spooky eluvian... I reached out to another clan and they've already picked it up. Buuuut... you do have to promise you'll be nice to Lucien and Poncy."

"The magical abomination and... who's Lucien?"

"The hearth spirit that guards the house from intruders," Merrill replied. "He's sort of like a security system who keeps people out that aren't supposed to be there."

Fenris was quiet for another long moment.

"And this safe-keeping thing.. has been here this whole time?" he asked.

"Sleeping," Merrill confirmed with a nod. "But he's awake and active now and all of the wards are on, which is why the place locked down tight when you chased me off. They were just making the place safe."

"I see," he said a little bit faintly. "It would have been nice to know of it earlier."

He shook his head.

"Nevermind. You still ask too much, witch. The point of this was for you to be unobtrusive, not for you to lay claim to half of my abode."

"You never even visit the other rooms," Aveline pointed out, sounding a bit cross with him. "And Merrill had to clean them up for you to make them fit for anything besides insects and wild animals. _And_ she patched your roof and replaced all of your windows with glass that can't be broken into. That act alone should qualify her to nest where she chooses."

"I didn't ask for her help," Fenris snarled.

"You also didn't thank her for it either," Aveline said disapprovingly.

"I'll tell you what Fenris, you just let me have that back corner of the house with the servant's rooms and the kitchen, the library along with the garden and um..."

She tried to think of something nice, but Fenris didn't ever seem to _enjoy_ anything. Then it hit her... he often seemed to worry about coin. She knew where there was a lot of gold, he was almost literally sleeping on top of it.

"And I'll split the gold with you!" she said triumphantly.

"What gold?" he demanded.

"Well, there's a vault hidden underneath the house that's only accessible through the hearth in the kitchen," Merrill said starting the babble a little bit in her haste to tell him all about the secret.

"It can only be accessed by the one who's keyed into the wards and has the Master Key. There's lots and lots of gold in it. Whole bricks of it, you could build a house of them if you wanted. I was thinking about giving it all to the elves in the Alienage to start over with but I thought that maybe Fenris wouldn't like that no matter that he's lived there ten years now and didn't know about it... and couldn't have accessed it even if he _did_ know about it."

Fenris and Aveline looked at her in shock.

"Why didn't you mention this earlier?!" Fenris roared at her.

"Was that... did I miss something important?" she asked hesitantly.

"Yes!" the two of them said in unison.

"Oh..." she said a bit dejectedly. "But it's all so boring, there's not a single book or magical artifact in the lot of them. It's just shelf after shelf of boring gold bricks and chest after chest of ordinary coins!"

"This I _have_ to see," Aveline said dryly as she gestured that the two of them she follow her back to the mansion so that she could see this wonder with her own two eyes.

"And I as well," Fenris said flatly as they walked through the streets to the mansion. "Best not to hope and be disappointed later, the little fool has probably mistaken those bricks for gold when it's really nothing more than shiny dross. After all, she cannot tell a demon from a hole in the ground."

Merrill was half tempted to tell the wards not to let him in.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much everyone who's been reading and reviewing and dropping kudos. Also thanks to those who have come over here fresh off the boat from Fanfiction.net I'm delighted to have you here and I'm so very pleased with the reception this fic has gotten so far. So I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has been reading this and other works I've been posting. If you're here for Soulbound well don't worry I have plenty more of that coming.

"My goodness!" Aveline exclaimed upon entering the front doorway for perhaps the first time ever when the front swung open invitingly when the wards sensed that the mansions true mistress approached the front door.

Fenris had not used the front door in years, having barred and boarded it up to discourage trespassers, thieves and any bounty hunters that might be interested in trying to acquire him. Instead, he'd been using a lesser servant's entrance to the side that led through a small series of rooms that he'd turned into a murder-gauntlet of traps for the unwary. Merrill had disarmed all of his traps in favor of the security measures already put in place by the house wards. Aveline paused to admire the restored beauty of the front entrance.

"It is very colorful, isn't it?" Merrill chirped brightly. "I'm quite sure I'd never known this was here if I hadn't been cleaning it."

The front entrance, even without the furnishings was a splendid affair of high ceilings, chandeliers, mosaic tile on the floor and murals on the walls and colored pane windows high above.

"Likely the smell of rotting corpses kept you away," Aveline said dryly. "Where are the corpses anyw-- _oh_."

Merrill had dried out the dead bodies that Fenris had collected and left to rot in the halls to get rid of the smell, then dangled them from the chandelier like some macabre decoration to (hopefully) keep Fenris happy.

"Do you like it Fenris? I kept them just for you," Merrill said hope in her eyes. "But it would be mean to have them just lying about where anyone could trip over them, so I put them up there where you can see them."

Fenris said nothing, just shook his head and pushed past them. Merrill whispered loudly to Aveline

"I think he likes them."

Aveline snorted.

The gaurdswoman insisted on poking around the different rooms and was brought up short when she peeked through a window out into the garden to see a walking suit of armor taking in the last of the washing.

"That's Poncy! Merrill chirped. "Or rather Pontius. He's so nice and helpful. If I hadn't been hiding him in the closet from Fenris it would have been a lot easier to just have him help me with the washing. He wouldn't carp and complain about it for one."

Fenris sneered at her comment and huffed impatiently.

"Oh very well mister antsy," Merrill said, reading his impatience to see the supposed treasure. "Well go see the vault. It's probably the only part of this house you haven't been in anyway, though I wouldn't hold your breath, it's not even very interesting looking. No carvings or anything."

Merrill led them through to the kitchen where Aveline seemed suitably impressed with how clean everything was and Merrill called out to Lucien, introducing Aveline right away and informing him that she was to be let in past the wards at any time.

"And now they want to see that vault with all those boring gold bricks," she added to the hearth spirit. "So I'll need to have that key back for a bit."

"Are you sure you wanna bring 'em down there, Missie?" the hearth-spirit said dubiously. "The lady looks well enough but that other guy looks kinda _shady_. And he's got a violent soul. Poncy an' I had ta throw him outta here and let me tell you, he didn't go down easy. He looks more like he'd sooner murder you than look at you, to be honest."

"Now now, Lucien," Merrill soothed. "You just haven't gotten to know his better side, that's all. I'm sure it's in there somewhere..."

Fenris scowled at her little joke.

"Oh, you mean the side of him that isn't a violent drunk who stews in an emotional mixture of hurt and rage for days if not weeks on end? _That_ better side?"

"I'm standing right here," Fenris growled. "And it is little matter to find a bucket of water in a kitchen, you little candleflame. I've no qualms about snuffing you out."

"I like ta see ya try you--"

"Now Fenris," Merrill said quickly. "That isn't how we make friends with the hearth spirit that keeps us safe at night."

Then she added pointedly.

" _And_ lets us past the wards."

Merrill plucked up the key that was buried point down in its own little holder in the center of the flames and the wall in the back of the hearth slid out without prompting to reveal the doorway. The stairs felt even more cramped and rickety now that there were two other people with her. It took only a few short minutes to figure out the new puzzle that the ward-lock had reset itself to, and the vault door swung open.

"Whoah..." Aveline said after Merrill had summoned some wisp lights to lighten the chamber so that they could see better.

Fenris was silent for a very long moment.

"Are you certain this is real?" he demanded. "These could all be fake, part of some scheme perhaps."

Aveline went over to a shelf and went to heft one of the gold bars and found that she could not lift it with one hand, it took two hands and some obvious exertion of strength for her to remove the bar from the shelf.

"The weight's about right for the size of it, if it's real gold," she said.

She took out a dagger and scratched the surface.

"It's soft too, and there's none flaking away. I'd need to take it to a Dwarven assessor to be certain, but so far it looks to be genuine. We have an assessor attached to the guardhouse that's trustworthy, well, for a dwarf. Counterfeiting coins and precious metals is always a big concern for the Dwarven Merchant's Guild. Having counterfeit coins in the market makes their coins worth less, so they have a vested interest in keeping the money supply pure."

"I could see if it's fully gold," Merrill said. "I'll just sink my magic into it and test out it's resonance. If there's anything off-key in it, that means that at least part of it is fake."

Merrill did as she'd said, sinking her magic into the metal brick and testing to see its composition. Her Keeper had taught her that trick to see that her Clan was not getting cheated by sharpsters for what little they did trade for.

"It's a solid brick of gold," she confirmed a moment later. "There's nothing else in there."

"That only brings up one more mystery," Aveline said. "Where did all of this come from?"

Fenris frowned.

"The house belonged to a mage, is it possible he may have been involved in some... magical counterfeiting scheme?" Fenris asked.

"Converting gold into coin is more complicated than just melting it down and stamping it with a fake seal," Aveline said knowledgeably. "The dwarven Council of the Seal have specially keyed coin-seals that are made with magic and lyrium. The magic in the coin-stamp makes it so that each official coin shows up on a special scanner as being authentic. Any coin without that magical signature is fake. The secret to making those coin-seals is known only to a very few in the Shaperate and the coin-stamps themselves are kept under lock, key and heavy guard every second they're not in use. It would take the intervention of the Maker Himself to pry one out of official custody."

"So then, barring Divine Intervention, what are we left with?" Fenris asked.

"One, these bars and coins are genuine, though that doesn't tell us how they got down here or why they're here in the first place," Aveline hypothesized.

"The previous owner was a merchant, perhaps he simply liked it that his wealth would be very difficult to steal should anyone make it past his extensive security measures," Fenris offered.

Aveline looked dissatisfied.

"There's something we're missing," she said.

"Oooh!" Merrill said hopefully. "Maybe it's magic! Maybe he magicked them all into existence."

"Don't be daft, witch," Fenris said scornfully.

"Actually," Aveline corrected him. "She might have something there. The conversion of one base metal into another is a very difficult and magically expensive process. I don't know the full details, but a mage can't just wave his staff and turn lead into gold. He has to convert it speck by speck, going up the chain of elements until he reaches the higher form he wants, each conversion costs a great deal of mana, or an awful, awful _lot_ of lyrium. It wouldn't be either cost-effective or magic-effective to convert lead into gold. Converting _this_ much... I'd say it was impossible, but perhaps the mage found some sort of workaround, or a magical shortcut."

Aveline must have seen the curious and speculative look on Merrill's face (as she wondered whether she could crack the secret) for the Guard captain quickly added

"Oh, and the study and use of magical conversion, particularly as it pertains to gold, has been _banned_ in all countries. If this pile here is the result of some new form of magical conversion, I'm afraid it would be confiscated."

Fenris looked dryly resigned to that fate.

"Figures," he muttered.

"We don't know for certain that it was," Aveline added in belatedly, clearly feeling a bit bad about it. "But the laws exist to keep a mage from just magicking up a huge pile of gold and flooding the market, making our standard of valuation worthless. If we have nothing to measure value against..."

Aveline left the sentence hanging.

"Then nothing is worth anything, and whole system, shaky as it already can be, collapses," Fenris nodded, seeing the truth of it.

"Oh... well the Dalish don't use gold,"Merrill said. "We just barter and trade amongst each other for what we need. We only use gold when we deal with outsiders."

"The world is not Dalish, witch," Fenris said tiredly. "I know it confuses you, but people like to use money, it's convenient. I'm sure even your sacred precious ancient elves of Arlathan used some form of currency since they didn't wander around in aravells like savages."

Merrill sniffed.

While Merrill and Fenris were discussing gold, Aveline was looking around. She checked the drawers and found the boxes holding pouches of coins, and drew out a small tool which she ran over each pouch of coins.

"My scanner says that these coins are the genuine article," Aveline said. "But that doesn't mean that whoever stockpiled all of this down here didn't somehow manage to get hold of an a true dwarven coin-stamp somehow and that these are all, in fact, counterfeit."

"We should look for it then," he said. "If this place has kept this a secret for so long, then it stands to reason that the original counterfeiters would have kept their stolen seal on hand to make more coins at need rather than keeping it in another location."

Fenris and Aveline each started at an end and started methodically going through every locked drawer as Merrill went about the room unlocking the drawers in advance. They pulled out each chest to discover that the pouches they'd found in the first chest were only the top tray of pouches, there were three more trays stacked inside full of pouches of the same valuations, each sorted by metal-type, and by country.

"Well there is one thing in your favor," Aveline added after a while. "It occurs to me that it's looking far less likely that wherever this came from, it's not counterfeit after all. I could buy a well-organized counterfeiting scheme having three or four, _maybe_ even managing five true seals. But that would be... difficult. Very, very, very difficult. I've seen some of the redundancies put into place against theft of those seals and I'd find it hard to believe that a counterfeiter could manage to take all of these different seals from all of these different countries without someone getting tipped off."

"Or. They simply figured out a way to counterfeit the seal's magical signature," Fenris offered. "Which is not comforting."

"That's another mystery though," Aveline said. "Even supposing you're right, an operation moving this mass of solid gold, even before it's been stamped would have surely been known to _someone_. In short, how would this treasure pile have been kept secret and forgotten for so long? Wouldn't at least one of the contacts moving the gold have come to the mansion to at least investigate it, if not try to find away to take it for himself?"

Fenris nodded agreement.

"I have lived here for a decade with this literally right under my nose and never had the faintest clue it was here," he said. "There was never a whisper of it among any of Varric's contacts in the Merchant's house, no-one ever came knocking, inquiring about the residence. I do not believe that it would show up on any of the former owner's taxes or revenue receipts either. If even _one_ person had known that he'd had even a fraction of this wealth hidden away, someone would have attempted to claim it. How did it get here without anyone seeming to know about it?"

"Oh! Now this changes things!" Aveline said, getting to a drawer about halfway around the room.

She pulled out a chest much like the chests they had previously found with trays of pouches holding coins but these chests, it turned out were smaller trays (and there were more of them per chest) that were all divided up into little velvet-lined sections. Each little niche held either a single large cut gem, or a number of smaller gems and a note detailing the amount and value of the gems written in a cramped, spidery hand.

"Hmm, indeed," Fenris said peering over her shoulder.

"If they were rough gems, that would be one thing," Aveline said. "Gems are not taxed or officially listed as existent, even after they've been mined, until they hit the Assessors House. The Assessors give a rough estimate of the value of the stone to the mine before it goes to the gem-cutters. It's only taxed as a valuable item after it comes out of the gem-cutters house and gets sold to a jeweler and the state collects an additional tax on sale."

"In short, if we were looking at counterfeiters we wouldn't be looking at cut gems," Fenris said. "We'd be looking at rough stones of value that could be cut and polished illegally without being taxed."

"Which only adds to the mystery," Aveline said. "Where did all of these gems come from? A mage who could convert base metals into gold somehow could certainly crystallize rare gems with purity, but those gems would all be raw crystals. These are all cut and polished."

"Unless the mage was also a closet master jeweler as well as a merchant and seal-counterfeiter and gold-maker," Fenris said. "There has been no-one beating a path to this place to claim any lost treasure and they certainly would have done so had they known of it."

"It just doesn't add up," Aveline agreed. "Besides, looking at those coins... most of them have at least some wear on them. They've been in circulation, they're not new-minted."

"Unless he was using his merchant business to traffic his new counterfeits a little at a time."

"But why would he store the used coins in with the fakes?"

The two of them went round and round, debating possible scenarios and Merrill continued poking around, still hoping against hope for some sort of magical shiny artifact rather than boring old gold bricks... though those pretty gems were nice to look at!

"What's this?" Merrill chirped curiously as her eyes spied a particularly long drawer in the back wall on either side of the safe where she'd found her documents of ownership.

She keyed it one of the drawers open and pulled it out to discover something different than more boxes of coins inside. The drawer was full of row upon row of leather-bound portfolios, each in its own clever little hanging file with dates written in tabs sticking up. Merrill pulled the one nearest to her out and opened the folio to read at the contents. The ink had been bespelled not to fade with age and the paper was also spelled to preserve itself, so she had no trouble reading the what was on the page. Her brow furrowed a bit in puzzlement as her eyes focused in on it. There was nothing to do with magic here, but all the columns of numbers and the lists of... things seemed significant somehow.

"...Still doesn't explain how--" Aveline said, then cut off as she noticed that Merrill seemed to have found a new lead for her to follow.

She was across the room in an instant, peering over Merrill's shoulder.

"They aren't words, most of them," Merrill said helpfully, handing the folio over to the experienced Guard Captain.

No interesting histories or lost (or rediscovered) magical knowledge, not even any journal entries. These looked a little bit like account entries of the sort she'd seen Varric do from time to time. They were rows upon rows with a string of six numbers, followed by a date, then another date, then a name, and last by a list of some sort. The lists contained dwarven measurements for metals and purity contents, as well as valuations, or types of coins, jewels listed by carats, and even some entries about small objects of value, like jade urns and other curios. Some entries had a long string of strange code characters on them, some did not.

"Waitaminute!" Aveline called out in triumph. "The Tidefar! I recognize that name. It's the name of a ship, and if I'm not mistaken it was pronounced lost at sea off the Wounded Coast about a decade and a half ago."

"How would you know this?" Fenris asked curiously.

"I once knew a fellow guard in Fereldan who rode on a ship called the Tidefar II because he was offered a discount on the price of his ticket if he would help keep the superstitious sailors in line," Aveline explained quickly. "He said that a lot of the crew were spooked about what happened to the previous ship. The captain told him that a storm had supposedly blew up suddenly out of nowhere, and that the ship and its cargo had been lost at sea."

"Valuable cargo?" Fenris ventured.

"Yes, the original Tidefar once belonged to one of the most affluent merchants trading on the Waking Sea at the time," Aveline confirmed.

"You have a mind like a steel trap, Guard-Captain," Fenris said.

"It's a gift," Aveline replied.

"This drawer is full of papers just like those," Merrill said. "I wonder what those long strings of numbers are all about..."

"They're co-ordinates," Aveline said firmly. "They must be where he sank the ships."

Merrill looked on cluelessly as to what all the fuss was about as Aveline pursed her lips lost in thought for a moment.

"Merrill," she said slowly. "Is it possible for a mage to put some sort of spell into something that will let them locate that something later on, no matter how far away it is?"

"Yes," Merrill said. "We Dalish use something a bit similar on our own valasliin when we cannot find a clanmate. It's not limited to blood, though using blood, like a phylactery, is particularly potent, especially if it's your own."

"I need a map. Oh, and do you think it might be possible that our merchant-mage friend has kept any records of his shipping that's survived on the premises?" Aveline asked.

"There's a wonderful map in the library, wait until you see it, you'll be so surprised! The library seems to be the only room in the house that was left untouched," Merrill said with a look at Fenris for mistreating the books. "If those record books are still to be found... oh wait, why don't I just ask Lucien!"

"Oh, wait, why don't we just ask Lucien where the gold came from," Fenris added on dryly.

"I don't think he'll know, or care about the information if he did Fenris," Merrill replied honestly. "Spirits are very focused, and his interest in the wards, and in the people coming into and leaving the premises, not on what objects his Keeper decides to bring in and what he does with them while they're in here. His only concern would be that they didn't leave without proper permission."

"Oh, well, there's that," Aveline said, clearly feeling a little glad she didn't have to feel foolish for missing a potentially easy answer.

Merrill cocked her head to one side and contacted the ward-spirit though her magic asking her question and receiving his answer.

"He says that the ledgers are all there too," Merrill confirmed. "They've been locked up in the storage bin under the table."

The three of them headed up the stairs after cleaning up the vault and locking the door behind them. They walked quickly to the library where they gathered round the wonderful map-table, which had gone back to its flattened map depiction, which was just fine with Merrill as it would give her a chance to impress Aveline with the amazing mechanical marvel. There were still some small stacks of books piled around the edges that Merrill had simply deposited there in the course of her cleaning. Aveline looked like she wanted to shove all the books on the floor, but Merrill sprang in front of her and gave her an unusually fierce glare. Fenris was surprised into a soft chuckle and even Aveline said

"I don't think I've ever seen you look so ferociously at anyone outside of battle, Merrill."

She looked instantly apologetic.

"I just didn't want you hurting the books," Merrill said. "Some of them are very delicate you know, and I don't know what they all are yet as they're all just crammed in here willy-nilly."

She gestured that Fenris and Aveline should gather in on either side of her and Merrill started to twist the turn key in the table as far as it would go. She let it loose once it was wound tightly and stood back to watch the amazement on her friends faces as the colorful map sprang up with rivers and mountains, forests and plains, clever cities unfolded themselves like paper-art, walls and towers, lakes and trees all grew out from clever gears and cogs within. Merrill thought it was quite the most amazing thing she'd ever seen that didn't involve magic... her friends reactions however were a bit disappointing. Aveline seemed impressed, but not enraptured by it, Fenris just raised a single eyebrow.

"Don't you think it's really something special?" Merrill pressed, feeling a little put-out by their nonchalance.

"It would have certainly cost a pretty penny to make," Fenris replied.

"He'd have had to apply straight to the Shaperate for work like this," Aveline nodded.

Merrill felt disappointed that they didn't think all of the cities and mountains popping up out of the table were as wonderful as she felt them to be. She shrugged, maybe they were accustomed to such wonders in the cities. Without further ado, she unlocked the compartment under the table by pressing the correct tower in the correct city, and unsealing the correct wards. The table raised up and unfolded revealing the sets of safes hidden away under it. Aveline and Fenris pulled out a few boxes of ledgers from one of the safes, flicked through them and told Merrill to put the table back down.

The map table had reverted flat again, with all of the funny straight lines back on it but Aveline seemed pleased to see it that way instead of popping up all wondrous and strange. There were lines cutting the map up into sections that Merrill couldn't account for the use of until Aveline did some sort of Shemlen seeking-witchery and found out how to turn the strings of numbers into points on the maps.

"Let's try the Tidefar first," she muttered apparently mostly to herself. Aveline set a tiny marker on the point that apparently matched the numbers on the manifest in the coin room and then they sorted through the library ledgers until they'd found a date that matched one of the ones on the entry for that ship. They flipped through the book until they found an entry for that date and that ship.

"Here it is!" Aveline said triumphantly. "The manifest lists the contents of the shipment as one twenty-four cube crate of tanned cowhide, brown, units one hundred and eight seven three by five sheets, hair removed, weight one hundred seventeen pounds. Standard insurance. Two eighteen-cube crates of beeswax, units seven ounces individual, three hundred units per crate, weight ninety-eight pounds. Standard insurance. One twelve-cube crate of stiffened boar-hair bristles, bunches three inches in diameter, total bunches one hundred, weight thirty-three pounds. Standard insurance. Ah! Special Item... One specialty jade wax-burner in the shape of a fish, gold inlay with silver leafing on the scales and two onyx cabochon eyes. Insured for _eighty_ _sovereigns_! Wow!"

Merrill's eyes widened, she knew that was a lot of money. It had taken Hawke only fifty sovereigns to buy into Varric's venture in the Deep Roads and that had certainly made him very wealthy.

"If an item is insured for a lot," Fenris said. "They would have put it in with like items that are also very valuable, would they not have?"

"I think it's likely," Aveline confirmed, already way ahead of him it seems. "And if that ship had went down suddenly and said items were lost at sea they would be considered salvage. Salvage at sea and on shore is considered fair game for anyone who finds it, regardless of the previous owners. That's partly why pirates are so pernicious; it's one thing to rob a ship but there's plenty of unscrupulous merchants out there that will pay to arrange little accidents for their competition's ships and the pirates profit double by taking merchant bribes and by selling their salvage. Maritime law can e a bit fuzzy about that unless said pirates are caught in the act or there's enough circumstantial evidence to warrant an investigation."

Aveline looked at the map and noted that the marker was already waay out in the middle of the Waking Sea.

"How would they have gotten the cargo back up after the ship has already sank?" she wondered. "Even the greediest pirate can only dive down so far before he runs out of air or the pressure of the water crushes him, and a treasure of that weight would have sunk to the bottom."

"Maybe it floated up on its own?" Merrill suggested.

"If that were so, it would have been recovered by the search teams that would have combed the area hoping to find survivors," Fenris rebutted.

"He must have had some kind of trick," Aveline muttered, mind working furiously at the problem.

"Regardless, we do know this," Fenris said. "He must have found out who among his allies or competitors would have been moving expensive and rare cargo and when somehow, he himself made certain to send some high-value luxury item on board so that it would be mixed in with all of the other valuable cargo in the secured part of the ship. He probably had a mage or two in his pocket able to call up a storm or encourage one to grow larger, or found some other way to make the ship founder."

"Perhaps he would have made the wood rot through really really fast so that huge holes grew in the bottom and the ship couldn't hold itself up anymore," Merrill suggested. "Then it would sink down with no-one the wiser."

She shuddered.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about those sorts of things on my trip from Fereldan. I hated being on that ship and I was so sick and so scared thinking about how easy it would be for me to die, just like the halla..."

"Once the ship was foundered, he'd be able to locate the cargo and go back for it with one of his own ships and a crew loyal to him," Fenris said. "Or he'd pick up a crew of roustabout's no-one would miss from some port town somewhere have them sail him out to his destination, pull up the treasure, and then kill the crew once he'd reached shore."

"That's terrible!" Merrill exclaimed.

"I do not think that a man who could plot out the murder of several ships crews like it was nothing would balk at a few more people no-one would miss," Fenris replied.

"We still don't know how he got the cargo to rise from the bottom of the ocean," Aveline said.

"Does it matter?" Fenris replied. "It happened, that's what matters."

"It also explains the trays of gems," Aveline said. "Our guy wouldn't have wanted easily identifiable pieces that were unusual and easily traceable, things like jewelry or knickknacks. Those sorts of things could be traced back to him in time. He must have melted the jewelry down into bars of gold and moved the salvage into Kirkwall smuggled in his own merchant crates so that he wouldn't have to pay the city tax that Kirkwall demands on all salvage recovered from sea or shore that enters the city."

"Wouldn't all of those gold bricks have seemed unusual Aveline?" Merrill asked curiously. "You and Fenris certainly seemed shocked by it all."

"Yes Merrill, they're very unusual," Aveline said patiently. "But not so much, perhaps, for a merchant. There's some who'll only trade in specie, that's valuable metal, but they don't like coins. Certainly eyebrows would have been raised if he'd come out with crates of gold bars, but one or two here or there as needed wouldn't seem unusual. And he likely could cook the books easy enough to account for the extra coin when he sold said bar of gold."

"Oh. I see," Merrill said, even though it seemed to her to be one of those terribly complicated city things she wasn't really prepared to understand.

Aveline mulled for a long moment, then looked over at Merrill and then at Fenris.

"The good news is... that pile of treasure is yours. The original owner might have murdered whole crews and and ships to acquire it, but nobody caught him at it, and by this point he's beyond mortal justice; he faces the Maker's judgement. Since you found the vault and inherited the house, the salvage within is essentially second-hand salvage now and can be inherited, gifted and passed on as you see fit... once the initial city-tax is assessed and taken out."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Fenris said skeptically. "Loose lips sink ships and all. If we get a city tax assessor down here and he looks at everything that's been stored away, he's gonna talk to _someone_. At the very least an assessment will be filed in the city tax house, and once it's in the records anyone could bribe a clerk to find out about potential rich targets to hit. I don't feel like spending all of my time fighting off every would-be master thief that cares to try their hand at breaking into my fortress."

"The bigger the money, the bigger the trouble," Aveline agreed. "Especially since, no offense, you two are elves. There's going to be a lot of people who would feel not only entitled, but _obligated_ , to take everything you have."

"Maybe we could just _give_ Kirkwall its fair share..." Merrill suggested timidly. "If they want it so badly, we could just give it to the city tax collectors. They don't have to know it was from us and that way everything is fair, but Lucien doesn't have to start killing intruders."

Fenris snorted, but Aveline smiled.

"An anonymous charitable donation?" she said. "That could work. We won't speak of this to anyone though. Better that fewer know. So congratulations you two, you're now the wealthiest elves in all of Thedas!"

"Oh... well, that's really great then?" Merrill said a bit uncertainly.

Aside of more books to cram into the library and some seedlings and raw ingredients to make potions and salves with, Merrill wasn't at all certain what she'd do with piles of money besides maybe sleep on it like a dragon.

"I'd suggest setting at least a little bit of that coin aside to help cover the yearly taxes on this place, seeing as you've dodged it for so long. Once Merrill takes command of the property legally, she will be expected to pay the requisite city-tax," Aveline said. "I don't know what you might do with the bars... varric would know though--" she looked sharply at Merrill.

"This is _not_ something that makes it into a letter to him, understood?"

"Oh, right. It's a secret," Merrill nodded solemnly.

The only secrets she'd ever kept up until now had all be the lore and history of her people, not something that anyone in the city ever seemed interested in learning about. She'd never really had intimate friends growing up so she'd never been privy to secrets and youthful confidences like other girls her age might have.

Merrill's stomach rumbled, reminding her that it had been a while since she'd eaten.

"I forgot about the pies I was going to make for dinner," Merrill said aloud, thinking back to the meat-pies she;d promised Fenris before this whole mess had started.

Fenris and Aveline both stared at her.

"It might take me a bit, but if you'd like to, you could stay for dinner Aveline, or you could even go and get Donnic if you'd like," Merrill looked hopefully at Aveline, having never had the opportunity to entertain her friends for dinner. "We don't have many chairs but I'm sure Poncy could lay out a blanket or something."

Aveline chuckled.

"You sure are something else sometimes, Merrill. And I hope you never change."


	8. Chapter 8

Merrill went back to the kitchen to start on making the pie crust, hopefully while Aveline went retrieved her husband. While the mage rolled dough and cut up ingredients for the filling of the pie, she related the mystery they'd solved about the ships and the gold to Lucien and added

"It's too bad I can't tell Varric about it, I'm sure he'd make an very exciting story from it."

The color of the flame shifted to a greenish blue color and he looked a bit dubious.

"I think yer little friends might be right about keeping a lid on things, Missie," Lucien said.

"Oh, but he could put it in a new Hard In Hightown installment," Merrill persisted, feeling a bit put out. "Or maybe the next Swords and Shields, and he could add in a dashing pirate and maybe an evil Magister!"

"Whatever floats your boat, pun intended," the little fire replied, disinterested in things that happened beyond his hearth even when they pertained to things within his walls. "So I guess you an' Mister Grouchy-Gauntlets must've made up then."

"He said he'll let me live here and have the gardens and the rooms I want downstairs if I'll stay out of his way _and_ he gets half the gold bars."

"You traded away a kingdoms worth of gold for a few rooms in a crappy run-down old house that you had to fix the roof of?" Lucien said incredulously. "I'm not savvy or interested in human things, but even I know that you just got a raw deal Missie!"

"Why wouldn't he get the gold? I might have the keys to the wards and technically be owner of the house, but he lives here you know," Merrill said.

"He's a squatter," Lucien maintained. "And since you have the ward key, _you_ own it."

"I don't see why everyone puts so much stress on owning this and owning that," Merrill sniffed dismissively as she stirred the pot of minced meat, sausage and vegetables that was to fill the pies, waiting for it to thicken a bit before she put it in the crusts.

"I mean, kicking my people off from their land and oppressing them for generations is one thing," Merrill added, taking the rolled out crusts and gently pressing them down into the individual greased pie pans. "But all this gold and houses and other silliness? I just don't understand it. Now that there's no eluvian to study, I could walk away from this place tomorrow and not look back. Well, except for Aveline. And I _do_ love all the books. But if I had an aravell that could carry all the books and I could write to Aveline, and Varric, and Hawke, and get letters from them in reply... well then I wouldn't have any problems."

While she'd speculated about the possibility of leaving, the pie filling had thickened and so Merrill scooped it into the crusts she'd placed into little individual-sized pie pans she'd washed (along with everything else!) the other day and placed a thin top-crust over it, crimping down the edges with a fork until she had seven neat little pies ready to go into the oven. There were only four of them, but she figured that two guards and a warrior would eat more than one pie each.

Poncy, seeing her Doing Things, had come over as Merrill began on the rolls for dinner. She sifted together the flour and dry ingredients for soft dinner rolls and added in the wet ingredients and set him to kneading it at one of the other counters in the interests of time.

"You'd leave me, Missie?" the little flame said, sounding injured. "I thought we were pals? Yer my new mistress, you can't just up and leave, who'd take care of th' wards and feed me bacon?"

"I suppose I hadn't thought of that..." she said. "Maybe after all of this time I've actually turned into a city elf."

The thought was an unsettling one. Merrill had always prided herself on being Dalish, one of the true keepers of elven cultural lore and history. But it was starting to sink in that she hadn't _truly_ been Dalish in a whole _decade_ , a span of time that would be half of her life before too many more years! What had started as a simple hiatus away from her people while she solved the mystery of the eluvian had become a permanent situation and... now she would never go home.

Merrill sighed, pushing the depressing thought away again. She'd think about that later. Later she could worry about how no man of the Dalish was ever going to want to claim her as his own, and how she'd never have an aravell, or a clan to call home, or any children...

 _:Stop thinking!:_ she ordered herself.

She had guests coming over, she should concentrate on that. She started the dough rising for rolls, and discovered that Fenris had found apples at the market so she could make apple tarts! She set Poncy, who was done tending to the bread dough, to peeling and coring and slicing the apples while she sifted together the dough for the tarts and set it aside. Merrill had taken lessons in city-cooking from an elf in the Alienage who cooked for one of the houses nearby over the course of the last few years, since she couldn't always get the ingredients for Dalish recipes, which were all she'd known how to cook. Merrill had actually become fairly proud of the skill in the kitchen she'd developed, as it had translated well into a skill for potions and other useful things.

"Rolls, meat pies, apple-tarts..." she mused aloud. "What else would they like, do you think?"

"Some kinda soup?" Lucien suggested. "You always have soup."

Merrill nodded and smiled over at him.

"Something thicker I think, but yes."

She got out the cream, the potatoes, the rasher of bacon and some of the cheese for a simple, thick and hearty potato soup. She flipped some of the frying bacon over to Lucien, who devoured it with every appearance of relish. Poncy kept the dishes washed even while she cooked and took over most of the simple tasks of kneading and mixing and chopping so that she could keep her attention on making sure things didn't burn.

She'd started the pies too soon, so in that area it was a near miss, but everything else timed out rather well. The pies and rolls were done first and she kept them warm by nesting them right next to Lucien (who looked both affronted to be treated like a mere kitchen fire) the tarts were next and placed on the window sill to cool, and the stew was done last. It smelled very good, though Merrill had never made city-food in such quantities before, it really wasn't all that different from cooking for a Clan and she'd done that plenty of times.

To Merrill's surprise while she finished up with the last bit of making dinner, Poncy went to make "seating arrangements" for dinner. She watched the process in mystification as he first carted out fromt he kitchen the last tablecloth to have made it through decades of neglect intact. The metal butler then fussed a bit over the fact that there were no napkins for a bit until he located a small stash of ones on a line nearby and carted those away too. Next he spent what seemed to be (for him) and enjoyable half hour raiding cupboards and drawers for a full matched set of plates and bowls and more plates and silverware and wine goblets. Then Merrill watched in surprise as he tromphed down into the wine cellar and emerged with three bottles.

"If Fenris planning on drinking one of them himself?" she asked in amusement.

It wouldn't surprise her.

"No Mum, he requested the selection for your guests."

"Oh, I hadn't thought of that! That's very nice of him I'm sure," Merrill said.

"Will you dress for dinner, Mum?" The very proper mechanical butler inquired in a slightly prompting tone.

Merrill looked at him blankly. put on differnt clothes only to eat in? That seemed like a silly notion.

 _:It must be one of those city things...?:_ she wondered to herself,not wanting to hurt Poncy's feelings or offend her guests at dinner either.

But none of her other friends had ever mentioned doing so...

"I don't have anything else but this," she said in confusion. "And Aveline and Donnic certainly never mentioned anything about changing clothes to eat in. Do the shemlen here wear special clothes for eating in?"

She'd heard they had special clothes for sleeping in, which seemed an odd practice. The Dalish either slept in their clothes or naked. Usually naked. Merrill slept naked.

"Very good mum," the butler sounded a bit sad.

Maybe he'd wanted to put her in dinner clothes. She'd have to ask Aveline about it. Even so, the mechanical butler used a nearby cloth to wipe her down of the flour that had dusted over her while she'd cooked. Merrill felt a bit like a small child being given a cat bath by its mother.

With dinner finished and the setting laid out to his evident satisfaction, Merrill was shooed out of the kitchen by Poncy to join Aveline and Donnic and Fenris, who were sitting down on scavenged cushions underneath the skylights in the main room. Poncy had scavenged one of the last remaining long, wide panels of steel-glass form Merrills batch of them and placed it on top of four stacks of books at the corners then covered it with the tablecloth so it looked like they were sitting at a low table. Tapered candles of different heights burned on mismatched candlesticks, but the place settings sparkled all the same.

"...Thought they were having a dancing party," Fenris said at the tale end of some story he was entertaining Aveline and Donnic with. "Leapfrog and everything."

"Are you talking about me?" Merrill said, sitting down at the cushions with a grace only a Dalish could summon for cushions of a floor, which to Merrill felt much more suitable than the high-placed tables and chairs that the humans used in thier homes (which always left her feeling like her center of gravity was centered on her bum n midair rather than properly sunk into her belly).

"Rudely," Aveline admonished Fenris, who looked amused and unrepentant.

"Oh you must have told them about that tapestry with the sex-party!" Merrill said cheerfully. "If you like it so much, you should hang it up, Fenris. It would look very colorful on that wall over there, and then _everyone_ could enjoy it!"

Donnic snickered. Aveline bit back a laugh. Merrill didn't see what was so funny, wasn't art made to be appreciated? What would be the point of art if you didn't let other people enjoy it too? She'd never understand shem.

"My goodness!" Merrill exclaimed when she looked at the table properly. "Look at all of _these_..."

She'd never before in her life had more than a single plate, a bowl and maybe three utensils _at most_ to contend with while she ate. In front of her sat three different sized plates stacked one atop the other, two bowls on top of those, four crystal goblets neatly arranged in a row on the right-hand corner along with two little teacups with saucers, another little plate off to the left side side, a fork and a spoon placed over top of her bowl and...

"One, two, three, four..." Merrill counted the sparkling array of silverware in a state of flummoxed amazement.

"Ten," Aveline supplied. "There's ten of them there. Three forks, three knives, three spoons and a seafood fork... that's the little tiny one on the end."

"That's not even counting the bread knife, the desert spoon and the _cake fork_ over there. I think your little metal manservant has been starved for entertainment for too long," Donic noted sounding amused. "He's gone a little bit off his hinges."

"Be nice," Merrill said gently. "Poncy hasn't had guests in so long and he is supposed to a butler too, so he's just excited."

"Is he going to kick us out if we eat with the wrong fork?" Aveline wondered, still sounding like she found the whole thing amusing.

"Oh He would never do that, I'm sure," Merrill said. "He's a helpful spirit and he likes making people happy."

Said helpful spirit came in next with a bottle of wine which he uncorked with ceremony and offered the cork for Fenris to sniff.

"Guess he knows who knows the cellar best!" Aveline teased Fenris.

Fenris, with every appearance of knowing exactly what he was doing, nodded his approval of the selection, and Poncy poured.

"It is a day for a celebration after all," Fenris said. "Though given certain person's inability to tell what they should speak of and what they should not where others can overhear perhaps it is better that we celebrate this in private."

"What are we celebrating?" Donnic asked curiously.

"It all started, so far as I know, when Merrill Here decided to clean Fenris' awful mess," Aveline started to launch into the story of recent eventsleading up to the discovery of enormous treasure.

Merrill was asked for her account of how she'd discovered the ward-spirit and the vault below the house, so she told them of her horribly disappointing first visit to the vault when she'd been hoping for artifacts and magical surprises but found only dull, ordinary gold bricks. Then, when everyone was finished remarking on her (very sensible!) disappointment, Aveline took up the narrative, telling her husband about their friend's little spat, and the negotiation that had led to the revelation of the gold in the underground vault and what had happened after.

The story took them through Poncy serving them soup and then taking the bowls away and serving them warm mince pies. Those had turned out very well, and Merrill was warmed by the compliments from her friends and pleased that they seemed to like them. It was a bit sad that they couldn't have everyone gathered, but Isabella was off having adventures as a pirate, and Sebastian had taken up his duty to be Keeper of his Clan in Starkhaven, Varric was off somewhere in Fereldan with Seeker Cassandra, Hawke and Anders were in hiding... it was just them. But still, some was better than none.

"This is incredible. It sounds like something from right out of one of Varrics books!" Donnic said when Aveline had finished telling them about how they'd solved the mystery of the origins of the gold (and whether or not Merrill and Fenris could own it in the free and clear).

"So how does it feel to be the two wealthiest elves in all of Thedas my friend?" he asked Fenris once the tale was finished.

"I don't... know," Fenris admitted. "I suppose it must be still sinking in. It feels a little bit like the very first time I realized I was a free man, really free and not just on a longer leash. It's a bit bewildering, like you know in your _head_ that the world is going to be different from what you have known before, but you're still not certain how... or how long its going to last."

There was a quiet moment at that honest statement, then Poncy brought in desert. Merrill asked for an extra tart because they were her favorite and the momentarily heavy atmosphere lifted again.

"You might refurnish this place," Donnic said in a light tone. "I don't know why, but now that it's clean it feels even stranger seeing nothing in it. When it was dilapidated and filthy, you expected to see emptiness wherever you looked, but now that it looks new again, it feels like you would expect someone to move into it."

Merrill kept her wonderment about the Shemlen obsession with shiny things and the special furniture they bought to display it all on to herself. She figured it was just another one of those oddities about living in a city she was probably never truly going to get accustomed to.

"But if Fenris or, maker forbid, Merrill ever went to any of the finer places to buy furniture, the vendors might refuse to sell to them because of... well, y _ou know_ ," Aveline said gloomily. "I've seen it happen before, and there's no law a merchant refusing to sell their wares, so I can't force them to act like proper beings."

"You could just tell them that you're buying it on behalf of your employer. You could make up a name and buy all sorts of things by pretending to be the stewards assigned to take care of this place!" Donnic suggested enthusiastically.

"Like that one play, The Clever Elven Servant!" Aveline laughed.

Merrill actually knew which play Aveline was referencing, for she knew one of the actors. It was a play about a shemlen whose only inheritance in a vast family fortune was a single elven servant, who then promised to make his master the wealthiest person in the land if they would promise to give them a position of rank in their household. The shem gave his word and the elven servant, by many clever schemes and adventures, mostly revolving around the elf pretending that his master was someone else, managed to secure merchant wealth and the hand of the Viscounts daughter.

"You could probably even get Varric to fake up some documents for you," Aveline said joining in on the fun.

"A thought," Fenris said in amusement.

"And you Merrill," Donnic turned to her. "What are you going to do with your share of the wealth?"

Merrill looked back at him in surprise.

"I hadn't given it any thought," she said honestly. "I might use some of it to hunt down artifacts that should rightfully belong to my people but have been stolen by the shem and wrongfully bought and sold among their own people for a while. Mostly though, I thought I might give it to the elves so they can build the Alienage again. So many of them lost their homes that night and the Chantry point blank is refusing to give them the least bit of aid, even though they need it. I though that was what Sebastion said that that Chantry was for. I don't want to say he must have been lying but..." Merrill shook her head and sighed a bit.

"Besides," she went on. "It might be nice to see them all have nicer places that won't collapse in on themselves like those old caves had used to do. Fresh running water and sewage that doesn't leak out and smell everywhere would be a good thing too. Oh! and to rebuild their harbor and fishing boats again. They'd have an easier time catching their own food and maybe everyone wouldn't be so hungry all of the time."

Aveline smiled over at her.

"Like I said Merrill, don't ever change."

Merrill noted that Fenris looked down a bit, but said nothing. The rest of the meal passed companionably, with a good deal of laughter (possibly helped by the wine) and several terrible hands of Diamondback. Aveline and Donnic went home several hours later with an extra bottle from the stores that they hadn't finished drinking and Fenris rose to go to his  own rooms. Merrill tried to follow suit, but found herself suddenly lying on her side with little idea of how she'd gotten there. She tried to climb to her feet the room spun around her and she flopped back down again. Fenris snorted.

"Can't hold your drink, can you mage?" he muttered, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her up over his back. Merril found herself looking at the floor with one of his broad shoulders pressed into her belly and the room still refused to hold still properly. Her tummy felt a bit strange.

"You there!" Fenris barked at Pontius, who was hovering nearby. "Where does she sleep?"

"This way Ser," the mechanical butler managed to convey both concern and disapproval in one sentence, which seemed pretty unusual for a Spirit.

The world started moving and Merrill flopped her head down, unable to figure out what was going on. The world tilted crazily again and she was deposited into something soft.

"I don;t sleep in my clothes," Merrill slurred a bit fuzzily, trying to pluck at her Dalish body-sheath and tabard.

"You do tonight," Fenris replied. "I'm not stripping you naked. Just try not to throw up."

"Are you happy with the food Fenris?" Merrill asked, ot having heard his opinion on her cooking skill.

"It was... finer than my usual diet. Roadside vendors and take-home pudds can be an adventure of the wrong sort some nights."

Once she settled, the world only spun a little bit, and Merrill closed her eyes and fell into sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

The next morning she felt a bit sick, so she tottered over to the bathroom sandwiched between the two little suites of former servant's rooms she'd staked out as her own in Fenris' mansion, and threw up in the sink. Feeling better and more clear-headed after, Merrill went out to the kitchen and drank a large glass of water.

"Being a blood mage does have it's advantages," she told Lucien as she sent a wave of her specialized magic through her own blood, cleansing it of its toxicity and restoring herself to rights again. "No hangovers for one."

While she'd been cleaning out her blood of the previous nights overindulgence, Pontius quietly clanked into the kitchen and started assembling a small breakfast for her from the remains of the meal the night before, which he had stored away in the cold pantry.

"I think I'll start to work on that garden," Merrill mused aloud to herself.

Unlike the rest of the house, the garden wasn't going to be something that was going to be done in just one day, certainly. Even though she'd tilled the hard-packed soil into something softer, it was still bereft of nutrients, so it was going to take a while for Merrill to infuse the soil with the nutirents and minerals that were going to support life again.

"First," she mused aloud. "I think I should decide on what basic crops I'm going to start with, then I know how to balance the nutrients for them."

That was going to be a bit harder than usual, especially at first. Merrill wanted to further the research into modifying plants. Her Keeper had once been one of the most adept of all the Keepers among the Dalish at plant splicing and modification. Merrill had absorbed all of the lore she'd taught her on the subject, and was an adept Nature Mage in her own right.

"I can actually get started on that one project I've been putting off! There's plenty of space here for it, surely."

Merrill hadn't thought much of it before, but she was in possession of a rather _unique_ skill set. She was a blood mage, but her study of that particular art meant more than just the casual boost in power that bloodletting allowed. Merrill had studied the blood _itself_ , there was a codex written within the blood of every organism that was the blueprint for how an organism formed itself. The Dalish often manipulated this codex in plants to bring about desirable traits in a seedling they planted. She was also a Dalish Nature Mage which meant that she'd studied the processes of nature in depth, and had a greater understanding of them than anyone else she'd met so far. She'd _also_ studied the inner spell-workings of the eluvian; the intricate, interwoven web-like spells that acted and reacted to each other with such intricacy that it was almost like a _living mind_.

_:Or at the very least, much like a simple organism itself, or an eco-system,:_ Merrill thought excitedly. _:And the traits and functions of moth can be manipulated to acheive a desired result, why couldn't I do it? I know I can.:_

All of that knowledge, combined with the fact that she had access to the compiled lore of nearly every other culture that had studied magic essentially at her fingertips in a way that no Dalish Keeper ever would or could, put Merrill in a unique position to try a few new and old things out.

_:It might sound strange, but I think with the right amount of work, that it could be possible to create a plant that can harvest, process and store magic in the same way that they do sunlight!:_ Merrill thought elatedly.

She'd had the bizarre notion a few years back, but at the time she'd been deep in her study and repair of the eluvian, and she hadn't had access to a garden in the alienage, so she'd only tinkered with the idea off and on, writing notions down in her notebooks to pursue later on once her eluvian was repaired. A deeper understanding of the spell-webs in the eluvian had led to an astounding breakthrough for her... she could, with the proper use of a vartiant on bloodmagic, _alter_ the proposed experimental plants' inner workings to mesh its own natural processes with magic in an echo of the ancient spellwebs of old!

"It would be a living spell!" she breathed to herself in wonder and excitement.

_:In fact,:_ Merrill thought to herself. _:I do not believe that I am the first to do so.:_

An idel afternoon of frustration in hitting a dead-end with her eluvian had once prompted Merrill to instead turn her attention to the blood-codex of an elfroot. What she had discovered there had surprised her quite deeply. The inner codex of the elfroot was a near-percfect echo in some places for the structure of the internal magical-webs she'd unraveled and studied in her attempt to repair the eluvian!

_:I think that most of the plants we know of today that are magic in some way, like Embrium and Elfroot and Crystal Grace, were all once tinkered with. I think that the ones who did the tinkering were the Ancient Elves of Arlathan!:_ Merrill thought. _:I don't believe that it was an accident that elfroot is so very useful and versatile. I think that it was bred, perhaps even **created** that way!:_

If she could replicate the work and make a successful prototype of the plant she had in mind... she could give an enormous gift of new lore to her people! What Merrill had in mind was nothing less than a way to bottle magic. At present, the only way for a mage to boost their mana was either to take Lyrium, which the dwarves had a stranglehold on the supply of (and charged accordingly!) or to use blood magic, which could be dangerous and chancy unless the mage was careful like she was.

_:And even then, sometimes it can still lead to trouble no matter what the user intends,:_ Merrill thought sadly.

The idea had occurred to her when she'd eaten flatcakes at an inn and they'd covered it, to her surprise in a syrup made from tree-sap. The Dalish did the same thing and Merrill had been an enormous lover of the sweet syrup-covered flatcakes her mother had made when she'd been a young child. It had made her homesick at the time, but then the thought occurred to her later on...

_:If I could make a plant that harvested magic from the Fade in the same way an ordinary plant harvests light from the sun, and if I could then get it to concentrate it somehow and bond it to part of its internal creations much the same way it already produces sugar to store away to feed itself, like in sap or maybe some kind of soft casing around the seed perhaps... I could harvest the magic and use it!:_

She'd worked on the various problems with the notion over the years when she hadn't been working on her eluvian. The problems were many and varied, but Merrill had always been a natural problem-solver when it came to magic. She hadn't solved all of the problems with the eluvian, but she'd solved a great many, and that work had led her to a deeper understanding of the way that elves in ancient times had practiced magic, and how it might be adapted to work in modern times. First she'd had to figure out which plant to use as the base-plant, and then what modifications she would have to add on to make her envisioned functions even feasible, then which plant's might splice in well, and what traits she would have to manipulate for. That was the easy part, it was working with systems she already knew well. Next she'd needed to design the spell-web that she intended to weave in. That was actually a deceptively bigg and tricky step, for it involved lifting the knowledge she had gleaned from her study of the interior spell-webs of the eluvian, and applying the knowledge to something completely different. A lot of trial and error had been involved over the years to figure out how the ancients might have folded spellwebs into the interior workings of the plants inner codex. Then she'd needed to figure out how she was going to need to the proposed plants own natural processes to keep the spellweb consistently active.

:I think I've cobbled together something that might work...: Merrill thought, looking at the theoretical Frankenstien of a plant she'd sketched in her workbook.

The plant itself, with it's interior structure written with spellwebs to draw off energy from the Fade and store it within a special sort of sap that it produced, was really only half of the work. From root to trunk to leaf, the tree itself was all part of an enormous spell-web array that mirrored many of the grounding and centering functions of the eluvian's interior spellweb arrays. If a tree started taking in and storing magic without a way to ground it safely, it would have become dangerously unstable very quickly so Merrill had used her study of the interior workings of the eluvian to transform the trees own living processes into a spell.

_:It's still going to take some work to put all of this together...:_ Merrill thought. _:But I suppose I could use some of that money I just found down in that Vault for that. Heaven knows that some of the markets in the port-city are just crammed full of exotic things!:_

Merrill had always been a bit entranced by just how much stuff traveled through the docks and markets of Kirkwall on their way to other places. Not just the books she liked to buy, but other things, like spices and exotic cloth, dyes, scents, glassworks, ceramics. All of those things usually graced the high market if they went anywhere, and were thus, usually well above Merrill's means, but she'd sometimes liked to come and gawk at all of the strange things in the market. And wouldn't it be neat if, somehow, the elves could manage to sell some of these things. She knew a number of elves who worked the stalls and did good business, but they worked for a pittance of a wage for a wealthy Shemlen master instead of getting to sell things outright. She also knew that the good produced were usually made by elves as well, and she also knew that many of the elves of the alienage could make those goods themselves if they had access to those tightly controlled natural resources. Controlling the means to make things was another way that the shem opressed her people, shed come to realize.

_:And what if we found a way to get them anyway...:_ she mused idly to herself. _:We could surely have a wonderful and prosperous market, if a way could be found. But I suppose that's neither here nor there for now, the elves are still a bit cross with me, so I'll work on this while they cool their heads and let me back into the alienage.:_

"Lucien," Merrill called over to the hearth-spirit. "Do you know if your former master kept books about gardens or plants on hand?"

"I dunno, Missie," the hearth spirit replied honestly. "I mostly keep track that the books don't leave th' premises, I don't so much care what's in 'em. If I were curious, I could probably get the information I wanted from the other Spirits... if I'd a mind to."

"I see," she said feeling a bit disappointed. "Well, perhaps before I start in on one project, I should clean up that library first."

It was the only thing left unfinished, and Merrill loved books anyhow. She had bargained with Fenris for her use of the librabry after all, so she should see what her bargain had caught her!

"Don't forget the other library too, while you're at it," Lucien said.

"Other library?" Merrill asked. " _What_ other library?"

"The one behind the shelves," Lucien said as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Behind the shelves?" Merrill echoed in puzzlement.

She could not imagine how anyone could fit another library behind a shelf, but she supposed that such a thing might be possible... especially if one were a hidden mage practicing in a place where magic was _supposed_ to be kept confined to the Circle Towers. Even Merrill was circumspect about using her powers in the open these days. She kept careful watch over what book vendors she bought her tomes of magic from... mostly she just went to Varric with a request and some money and he produced something akin to her request a few days later. She'd fantasized about making a run on the Gallows library now that there were no more mages or templars living in it to see what sort of books she might find, but even _her_ daring had its limits!

"Yeah," Lucien said. "All of the shelves in the library can flip around on some kinda mechanism built in to the bookshelves. The ones he usually leaves out are mostly there for show, and all the ones he used ta always look at are on the back side of the shelves that get hidden when they're turned around like normal."

Merrill felt a fluttering thrill of excitement. At last! The treasure she'd been hoping for when she'd first heard about the vault under the house. No mere boring bars of gold and silver and boxes of plain ordinary money, but the _real_ treasure, the treasure of the mind!

"How do I get the shelves to turn around?" Merrill asked excitedly.

"You use the Master Key," Lucien said. "There's a keyhole in that big desk bolted to the floor and you turn it to lift up a section of the top. Underneath you find a lot of keyholes. You used the Master Key turn each little lock and that reveals each section of shelf hidden away in the woodwork."

"Oh my!" Merrill exclaimed. "That's very clever, it's like a secret! How exciting!"

Merrill made short work of her breakfast and dashed away to go and investigate the library more thoroughly. Sadly her fluttering heart sank a bit when she pushed open to double doors to the two-story sunken library.

"Creators on a halla!" Merrill exclaimed to herself as she took in the full view, in broad daylight, of the state the poor, neglected library had fallen into over the years.

The other two times she'd visited had been either at night or in the twilight at the end of the day, and the curtains had been drawn shut, locking the room in constant gloom. The glass-ceiling now rained in light from the room above, and the curtains had been drawn back from the windows in the outside walls to reveal to true state of affairs in the sadly neglected library.

The library was actually even bigger than she'd originally assumed it would be, as it was sunken deeply into the floor, adding on at least half of an extra story as one descended the steps from the double doors at the entrance at the far-end. The book shelves flanked the entire room, reaching up for a story and a half with breaks only for the tall, wide windows. The windows along the right-hand side and the back (as the library anchored one of the corners of the house) started at just above waist-height and rose up for a full story. To make the extra half-story of shelving accessible, there was a rail built into the shelves with a clever little ladder on wheels to be pushed around on it. The room was long but not narrow, and it was big enough to accommodate a once-plush seating arrangement of a couch, a divan and a number of matching stuffed chairs in the corners, as well as the huge built-in map table and a very, very large desk in the back spanning the two windows. The furniture, sadly, had been utterly destroyed by mice and other inhabitants over the years.

The bookshelves themselves were half-empty, books flopping sadly this way and that, unable to keep themselves erect by pressure inside of their neat little niches. Instead of full shelves, there were books piled haphazardly all over the place. Stacks and stacks of them formed little hills and mountains on the floor. The large, built-in table that had a mechanical map of Thedas in its surface that was somewhat cleared off, but only because they'd used it the day before, the books that had been stacked in the cleared-off space, were now stacked elsewhere.

_Everything_ was dusty! There were cobwebs thick enough to wear in every corner, dust and dirt caked every crevice of the intricately carved and inlaid woodwork of the shelves. The books themselves, whether they were still tucked away on the shelf or piled up in stacks on the floors and furniture, were all universally dusty. The bibliophile within her was aghast and wanted to reach out right then and _fix_ things!

"Lucien!" Merrill called, with both her voice and her magic.

A small crystal orb-shaped thing that she had taken for one of the Libraries numerous knickknacks and curiosities lit up faintly.

"Yes Missie?" the orb asked in Lucien's voice, the glow inside of it flickering and pulsing in time to the sound of Lucien talking.

"Please find Poncy for me and ask that he come to help me in the Library, if you would," she requested politely as she saw no reason not to be polite to the little spirit. "I can see we've got our work cut out for us."

Merrill could see at first glance that the library had been raided of much of its original stores, probably by indigents looking for paper to light a fire with. The shelves at the back were denuded completely, and Merrill didn't think that even all of the hills of books already stacked on the floors would restore them.

"At your service, mum," Poncy announced with a bow from the door way.

"That's good," Merrill said, gesturing all around her. "I'm going to need all the help I can get, I think."

She took in a deep, fortifying breath. She'd never been one to let herself be daunted by a difficult, or even a hopeless task, and she wasn't about to start now. She'd do it just like she did any other difficult thing, one step at a time.

"First, I think," she said party aloud to herself, and partly to her mechanical-spirit butler. "We shall simply have to take all of these books and knick-knacks out of the library and dust them all off. We'll store them for now in the atrium, for it's the biggest open space we have, and I think we'll be needing plenty of room to organize this lot!"

Her Keeper, though her selection was perforce quite small, had been absolutely fanatical about keeping her tomes of lore organized according to the book-keeping system supposedly used int eh great libraries of Arlathan. She had once told her First about the system that the ancient elves or Arlathan had used to organize their own vast stores of knowledge and Merrill planned to resurrect the system in that place.

"And if there should happen to be extra room on the shelves once I'm finished," she added to Poncy in private delight. "There's no reason I can't visit one of Varric's family's bookshops, I do believe his cousin has a fair-sized on in the Hightown Market, or even better... Xeneon the Antiquarian!"

He was a creepy... whatever he was, to be sure, but Merrill admired his dedication to collecting lost and valuable lore. She now had enough money to purchase some of his prohibitavely expensive tomes, scrolls and artifacts and they'd look lovely there in her new library!

"Very good, mum," the walking suit of armor said.

Merrill started with the top of the nearest pile, picking up as much of the stack as she could carry and transporting it down the hall and out into the main atrium. She picked a place at random and gently deposited the stack there. Poncy followed behind a moment later with an enormous stack of books balanced precariously in his arms.

"Be careful," Merrill cautioned. "Mind you don't drop them!"

"Yes mum," he said, depositing the tall stack right next to hers. They both went back for more, Merrill's lesser strength meant that she was not able to lift and carry as much as the magical construct, who carried easily three times as much as she could manage in a single trip. They went back and forth, back and forth, picking up stacks of books and carrying them out into the main atrium.

"I see I need not ask you what you are up to now, Witch," Fenris remarked from the balustrade that looked out onto the atrium when he finally poked his nose out later in the morning.

"Good afternoon lazybones," Merrill replied pertly.

He scowled down at her.

"This is where I excersize," he remarked.

"It's only for a little while," Merrill said, trying not to feel her patience sorely tested with him already. "Just until I've been able to clean these off and get them all sorted. Then I promise I'll put them all right back on the shelves and you can excersize away to your hearts content. In the mean time..."

Inspiration seized her.

"Why not go shopping?" she said, trying to make it sound enticing, mostly just to get him out of her hair and out of her way. "You're wealthy now. Surely you could run about and get all new furnishings if you wished, as the house is quite stripped of them and you city elves do enjoy being magpie about things."

Fenris looked as though he were seriously considering her suggestion, which was surprising, usually he dismissed anything she had to say to him out of hand simply because she was a bloodmage.

"And being a city-elf, you'd surely know more about that sort of thing than me," she blatantly flattered him.

Fenris was utterly certain that he was not suceptible to flattery, and thus, he was completely vulnerable to it. A little self-deprecation, a bit of thick praise and he was surprisingly manageable! He'd probably never be pleasant, but at least she could manage this much.

_:Is that how most other women who've married all manage their men?_ : Merrill wondered privately. _:They just flatter and praise them and then do what they want anyway?:_

"I believe that I shall begin to make selections and commissions for appropriate furnishings, now that this place has been cleared out," he announced as though he'd thought of it.

"Have fun," Merrill said absently as she perused the titles on the bindings of the stack she'd just set down.

"Witch," he added a moment later. "I will need your key to access the vault."

"Ah, that's right," Merrill said, a little bit annoyed by having to take herself away from her current task, but if it would get rid of him for some of the day, she was all for it. "There's some coin in the office safe in the master study too," Merrill said, walking up the stairs. "And you don't need the Master Key for that."

She showed him up to the room and demonstrated the trick to revealing the hidden safe and then gave him the combination so he could access it himself whenever he wanted without having to pester her about it. There was a sizable stack of coin pouches kept within the safe, which Fenris took, and he then "requested" (if one could call his phrasing a request) that she replace the boxes of coin with more from the vault downstairs. Merrill said she would do so if she remembered to and went directly back to her own work.


	10. Chapter 10

Fenris took himself off to go and buy Creators only knew what. Merrill had not the first idea of what went in to putting furnishings and hangings and... those great big, furnishing-things thats' only purpose was to hold other other _things_ in a house this size. She was vaguely aware, from what she had observed of the Ladies of Hightown at the Market, that it involved a great deal of debate about the needless decoration and this style as opposed to that style, and comparing swatches of cloth and samples of different colored wood. She wished him joy of it. Right then, _she_ had a library to clean and organize!

Even with Poncy's great strength to carry out the books, it took most of the morning to transport the shelves and all the stacks of books that had accumulated on the floor. They also had to take down all of the various curiosities, some of which were actually quite delicate, from the shelves and transport them out before they could remove the books from the shelves. The sitting arrangement of couches, divan, and two overstuffed chairs that occupied the fore of the room had been nested in by wildlife, so Merrill simply turned it to ash instead of trying to salvage it and Pontius swept it up. Pontius even took out the rugs, which were in deplorable condition and placed them outside for washing. When they had finished clearing out the library all that was left was the huge built-in table in the middle of the room, the large desk toward the back, and a whole lot of empty shelves waiting to be cleaned. The room looked, to Merrill, like a large, echoing cavern with sunlight slanting in sparkling golden beams through the air, catching all of the stirred up dust.

"My goodness," She remarked of it's empty state. "This seems like a lot of room to store lots of books. I can hardly wait to refill the shelves. But first, I absolutely must know what those hidden shelves hold."

Merrill was all set to explore the hidden shelves immediately, but Pontius appeared with a tray piled high with food and looked at her as expectatnly as a six foot tall walking suit of armor could look at a person.

"But I really would rather look at the books," Merrill hesitated.

The aura of intensity that said "but it is time for lunch" hovering around Pontius intensified and Merrill gave in.

"Oh very well," she said, relenting. "I suppose if they've waited this long, they can wait until after lunch. And now that I'm smelling it, I am really hungry. We put in a hard mornings work. Thank you Pontius."

She broke for a quick lunch at the enormous desk, then, excited by the prospect of seeing the hidden library, now that the library proper was cleared out, Merrill tried not to flutter with eagerness as she made her way over to the built in desk at the back. She hadn't taken more than a passing glance at the desk of continental proportions that occupied the very back of the room, being mainly concerned with the bookshelves and their contents. The desk was certainly very large, Merrill would have thought it ridiculously big if she did not know that it held the secret key-panel that unlocked the hidden shelves.

"If this desk were any bigger," she announced to Pontius in amusement. "I'd be able to pretend its an aravell and move half of my clan around in it!"

The stoic armored butler either didn't understand her joke or had no sense of humor to start with... but it was a Spirit, so probably it was the latter. Merrill took out her Master Key and slipped it off the chain around her neck then unlocked each of the heavily warded drawers in it. The bottom right drawer held leather hanging-files that held contracts and trade agreements. The bottom left held also more of the same. The middle-right drawer held trays of pens and inkpots, a seal, wax, stationary and other supplies useful to have on hand. The middle left held a loose assortment of useful articles like a magnifying lens on a dwarven folding stand and a matched set of paperweights and other things Merrill couldn't fathom the purpose of. The drawer directly at the waist was heavily warded, and when Merrill opened it with her key and pulled it out she felt wards brush against her magical aura, testing to make certain that she was the person who was supposed to be holding the Master Key.

"That's odd, I don't see anything for me to unlock," Merrill said as she looked into the shallow middle drawer.

It held a fancy dwarven pen in a little box, sheaves of special paper that she could sense was laced with magic, a little inkpot that she could also sense was laced with magic, a wax and seal set that were reeking of magic. Ordinary enough if one discounted the supposedly forbidden magic.

"It's all the way in the back of the drawer, Missus," Lucien hinted. "The keyhole is hidden by a false back."

"Goodness but this fellow seemed to like redundant security!" Merrill groused to herself as she slid aside the back of the drawer as Lucien had instructed and inserted her key into the lock.

She didn't see why all of the secrecy, _she'd_ practiced magic all but openly in Kirkwall and the Templars had never come knocking on _her_ door! Then again, she'd had Hawke and Varric and Aveline. Perhaps a mage who wanted to stay out of the Circle but didn't have friends like she did _would_ have to be more circumspect about his magical leanings.

Merrill was a'flutter of anticipation as she turned her key in all of the lock and the inkblotter section of desk over the drawer popped up to reveal two neat rows of locks each with a different color inlaid around the keyhole. Merrill inserted her key into the first one and started a bit, happy to hear the soft sounds of clicking and gears moving as the woodwork on all of the shelves seemed to come alive. The various hollows in all of the carvings filled up and the bas-relief carvings seemed to fill in. At the apex of every shelf a shield with the house crest appeared, each crest glowing softly in a different color, and the panel of locks under her hand all glowed in colors to match. Merrill picked the color of the nearest one and inserted her key, turning again, this time in the opposite direction. The woodwork carvings glowed briefly then the shelf pushed softly out of the wall supported by four great, hinged metal arms, two at the top and two at the bottom, that joined in the center. The whole shelf spun around on a central pivot, like a spinning coin on its side, supported by the arms then it pulled back into the wall once more.

"Here it is! Here it is!" Merrill exclaimed jubilantly as she rushed over to the ladder to see what sort of books of ancient lore that the former owner might have concealed.

She skimmed the first of the titles and was overjoyed to discover that her excitement hadn't been in vain, the books were all about magic! And they weren't the dry, fusty, Chantry-approved sort either, there were no "Elemental Primers" or "Studies of the Four Schools," or "Entropy at Entry-level" books _here_ , no all of them were advanced texts in a great many languages. The subjects ranged from studies of magic in the natural world, to mechanicals and magic, to otherworldly theories about the Fade and Spirits, to alternate uses of blood magic.

"Oh look!" Merrill exclaimed as her eyes caught upon a particularly thick and ponderous tome and the name of the author emblazoned in bright gold letters along the spine of it. "Fenris' former Master Danarius has published... Oh _dear_..."

She flipped open the tome out of curiosity and discovered that it contained a compilation of all of the work and "research" and theory that that horrible old Magister had placed into creating a "Lyrium Warrior" which must have been what he'd decided to call what Fenris became. She flipped on in morbid fascination. Part of her wanted to stop because it felt like a gross invasion of privacy to learn exactly and in excruciating detail what had been done to make a "Fenris" but her own natural curiosity couldn't quite seem to make her tear her eyes away from the dreadful thing.

_:He didn't **have** to do it this way!:_ Merrill thought in growing anger, the sickened sorrow and fury mounting further on she read.

Merrill had often thought, in the privacy of her thoughts, that Fenris' markings _had_ to be based, at least in part, on elven Valasliin, (no matter what he said about them). Well, she hadn't been entirely wrong, but they were certainly very different from what she had been raised with. They were a process; an interconnected working of magic that both cleansed his blood of any poison from the lyrium and fueled the spell with every beat of his heart. The "spell" had been supposed to make use of the "meridians" which were the natural channels that sent magic flowing throughout the body, which every elven Keeper knew of for it was part of the preserved lore of the Dalish... but since Danarius had _lacked_ this knowledge he'd been forced to make a guess.

_:No wonder poor Fenris is so cranky all of the time,:_ Merrill thought to herself as her eyes traced over the patterns that Danarius had recorded in his study-book. _:Almost **none** of these are in the right place!:_

A lyrium brand running at odds with a body's natural magical flow-path would cause a crimp in the magic's flow as the two systems fought each other. The result was probably not very comfortable.

_:And in addition... his application!:_ she thought in utter horror and disgust.

There was no patience, no methodology, certainly there was no care for his "subjects" or their well-being while they were undergoing the grafting procedure. They weren't even people to him, only successes or failures. He'd even experimented on _children_!

_:Horrible, **awful** man! He **could** have shut down the body's pain receptors, he **could** have went about it gently but **no**! He just... cut in and burned the molten hot lyrium into them, then stood back and watched to see if they'd live!:_

He didn't even try to administer them like proper valla'slin, the way Merrill might have if she'd gone about it, (if she could ever bring herself to do something so terrible to another person, which she simply could not imagine!). If he'd just been kinder and more caring, or at the very least more delicate, and cared about the people under his hands there wouldn't have been near so many "failures."

_:But that awful brute clearly didn't care, and Fenris probably still suffers to this day, if this is anything to judge by...:_

"Oh... Creators..." Merrill whispered in a horror that made her drop the book as she turned the page and understood what was on it.

It was a mind-hex spell to make the proposed Lyrium Warrior more "tractable" by erasing all of "the subjects" memories of their lives, their families, their friends, and all of their past attachments, thus making their master their only contact in all of the world. The pain followed by isolation would have made what kindness their master did bestow upon them all the more effective. Merrill was nearly sick as she read of how that mental manipulation was combined with subtle bloodmagic to prey upon their successful subject and keep them obedient. Fenris would have had to have possessed an astounding will to have resisted such a working on the first place.

_:I... I think I'm going to be sick,:_ Merrill thought faintly. _:I've heard him speak of the terrible things that the Magisters do in Tevinter, but it's so much harder with the proof of it in front of me.:_

Hearing Fenris crap on and _on_ about it day in and day out over the years had sort of inured her to the reality of what he said. It seemed so far away and distant, and even though she personally knew someone who had endured such mistreatment, it had happened before she had come to know him, and thus it still didn't feel real to her on an emotional level.

Pale, shakey, and feeling sickened, Merrill put the accursed book back on the shelf and turned the shelf back around. She walked out of the library, suddenly in desperate need of some fresh air. She could not cleanse her mind of what she'd seen, however. She knew how his lyrium-granted abilities worked now, and how he'd gotten his brands, and how he must have suffered both during the procedure and after... and she wished she didn't. She wished she could go back to the ignorance of before, when Fenris had only been a cranky mage-hating housemate who carped endlessly about all of her bad choices in life. The thought of him laid out on a table with sharp, hot knives cutting and burning into his skin while he'd been fully conscious and utterly without the benefit of any medicine or the least bit of magic to lessen the pain, and then someone had taken molten-hot lyrium and...

Merrill heaved, trying not to be sick as her all too fertile imagination supplied the rest. And in addition to the grafts would come treatments and injections layered with spell-bound rituals to force his body to comply and adapt to the alien substance forced into his skin and bonded to his blood. The thought of how he must have felt was almost more than she could stand. For years she had worried about Tamlen, lost somewhere out there, alone, without anyone to find him and guide him to his Clan. She worried relentlessly as she poured everything she had into fixing the mirror, finding him and bringing him home. What Fenris had endured surely put her worries about Tamlen utterly in the shade! Merrill wanted to go and find Fenris, to embrace him as she would have any other member of her clan who had survived such a terrible ordeal and tell him that everything was going to be alright now, that she would help him and support him and make certain that nothing terrible ever touched him again for he was clan now.

She snorted then, in amusement, as her mind abruptly tried to supply the image of how well _that_ idea was likely to go over. Likewise to any attempt that Merrill might make at trying to play Keeper with him. He might tolerate her presence since she provided edible food for him to eat, and wealth and safety via the house wards, but he'd have no patience at all with her trying to advise him.

_:Not that he needs my advice in the first place,_ : she thought. _:It's more likely to be the other way around.:_

Merrill hoped that her unfortunate new-found knowledge of the inner workings of his Lyrium brands wasn't going to make things awkward for them, or rather, even more awkward.

"I hadn't given it much thought before, but, we're going to be living together now," she mused to herself, her mind still stumbling a bit over such an alien concept. "I wonder how well his plan of just staying in our separate parts of the house and pretending the other doesn't exist is going to work out."

Her private opinion was, not so well. For one thing, they were going to eat meals together. Merrill planned on taking over the kitchen and back garden once she was finished with the library for her work with the new plant she wished to develop.

"I suppose we'll just have to see," she thought to herself.

The breath of air and a few minutes time to come to grips with what her curiosity had gotten her into this time had restored Merrill's equilibrium enough that she felt she was ready to go back in and look at what the rest of the library might reveal to her.

She didn't turn the bookshelf with the Danarius' grimoire on it back around, but she did decide to unlock all of the rest to browse the contents. The hidden shelves had remained untouched over the years and the preservation spells on the shelves were intact as well, so there was not even any accumulated dust on them. Merrill was overjoyed to discover that the hidden shelves were full nearly to bursting with books of arcane lore. There was even a section of shelf with special honey-comb style niches designed to hold scrolls, and every scroll had its own special tube decorated with inlaid precious gems and metals with the title of the scroll embossed on two sides of it as well as the end scroll-cap.

"Oh! How wonderful! Elven scrolls!" Merrill celebrated jubilantly to herself once she came across a small selection of original elven-style scroll-casings and the contents were revealed to be original elven silk-scrolls by their vallan. Merrill excitedly skimmed through the selection.

"Hm... poetry. Poetry. Poetry. More poetry. A calendar. Oooh, a philosophical tract about... looks like something to do with... i can't make out much off-hand... I wonder what that vallan-character means..."

She'd be setting that one aside to study later.

There were another few scrolls about mundane things like baking elven cakes and pottery techniques, there was a few about what seemed to be some bit of history lost to time. There was one that appeared to be about the ancient elven form of blood magic that piqued Merrill's interest. There were a handful of other scrolls that would require further study to determine what they were about, for vallan characters were tricky to decipher and even the Dalish only retained a fraction of the thousands upon thousands of vallan-characters that the elves had written with.

"I should finish this library first before I settle in for good study," she ordered herself, knowing full well that if she didn't be firm with herself she'd get lost in history and magical study and never get back to her original mission. "The scrolls have kept for all of this time up until now, they can keep a few days more."

It would give her further incentive to finish the library quickly. Merrill pulled herself away from the scrolls and turned to the rest of the shelves. There were so many books!

"How could one person read all of these?" she wondered to herself, then thought of her own former library back in her little former hovel in the Alienage.

"But my own collection wasn't even a fraction of the size this fellow has kept hid away," she thought out loud to herself, looking at the section upon section and shelp upon shelf of books. "I wonder if he read them all or just got them as a gift from his own Keeper when he set up here."

She thought about the great vault of treasure underneath the hearthstone and then decided that he'd likely bought a large number of them with the intention or reading them later, or maybe just horde them away the same way a dragon horded treasure, Merrill was herself guilty of that once she had the space to keep as many books as she cared to.

It was by an act of will that Merrill re-turned all of the keys in the hidden panel and let the vast store of arcane knowledge hide itself away again behind all of the mundane bookshelves that were still in need of cleaning. Once the originals had been restored, Poncy took a small pile of rags and a bucket of lightly soaped water up the ladder in the furthest corner of the room and began to meticulously clean every whorl and curlicue in the intricate woodwork as well as the flat, dusty shelves themselves. Since there was only one ladder and he looked like he didn't want her getting her hands dirty with all of the cleaning, Merrill took herself off to go get her hands dirty elsewhere.

Piles upon piles upon piles of books awaited her out in the main room. Even with the knowledge that this great mountain of words was not the entirety of what had once lined the shelves, it seemed like a daunting task to dust, separate and sort all of the books but Merrill was quite determined to have at it. She'd brought plenty of dry rags with her fr dusting off the books. If there was one thing that the house still had plenty of it was rags from all of the linens that hadn't made it through the years that Fenris had been master of the manse intact.

"The first thing I think I'll do is set up spots for me to organize the system."

Her Keeper had never been in even any of the ruins of the Great Libraries, nor had her Keeper before her or his Keeper before him or her predecessor before her. Still the lore upon the classification of books was preserved by the Dalish, even practiced a little in the way that the Keepers organized how they stored the few volumes of lore they kept on hand in their aravells to travel with. Merrill had once put back a book out of place in her studies and had been lectured for hours about it later and made to recite and then reorganize Marethari's entire collection and then write a paper on the ancient lore of book organization.

Merrill picked out spots for each general category to go and denoted them with a differently colored globe of glow-fire hovering in the air above that spot. Philosophies, Empathic Studies, Religions all had one spot. History had another spot (to be later broken down into sections based off geographies and the eras). Military Studies. Then came Geography, Cartography and Oceanography.

"...Politics and Laws," she muttered to herself, setting another globe hovering in the air over the spot she'd chosen for the section. "Musical Studies. Art. Literature. Folklore."

Three more colored globes and she was beginning to run out of distinct colors.

"Mathematics. Mechanics. Natural Studies. Medicine. Agriculture. Natural Philosophy. Aaaaand... I think that's it," Merrill said aloud.

Then she shrugged her shoulders and added on a new section for her to put her beloved recreational novels in. She simply would not consider it a library without the newest installment of Varric's Swords and Sheilds.

Merrill then set herself to the task of picking up each book, reading the title and respectfully dusting it with a soft rag by hand, being mindful that many of them were very old and cold be surprisingly delicate. She looked at the spine to check the title and could usually tell by that alone where to place the volume in question. "Qunari Numerical Systems" was fairly self-explanatory, as was "Elevation, A Study of Dwarven Pumps" and "Lion's Pride: The Birth of the Orlesian Empire."

A number of them required some perusal to determine where they should be sorted to. "The Curious Case of the Mumpersnak" might have gone into the Recreational pile, or the Folklore section. Investigation revealed that it was a regional study on the High West Orlesian Legends about a Spirit-creature called a Mumpersnak that, apparently, dwelled in the small, deep lakes of the area. Merrill had to force herself to stop from reading each volume she opened by habit. The texts on math and mechanicals were easy for her to put away, but the histories (even the ones that were blatantly _wrong_!) or the tomes on medicines, agriculture, and natural philosophies were difficult to only skim and then set away for sorting.

The task of perusing and sorting the lore eventually soothed away the troubles caused by Danarius' tome, though Merrill had resolved to herself that she was going to try to be nicer to Fenris from now on. The day passed enjoyably for her, sorting and dusting books.


	11. Chapter 11

Hours later she heard Fenris be allowed into the mansion through the wards on the front door. The book-mountain was diminished by half, at least, and there were several sizable book-hills dotting the room as Merrill had managed to sort (and dust) each book. There was a pile of dusting-rags she'd used in her work thus far that were absulutely black with dust and would need to be cleaned all over again. It was like the work never finished! Sorting and dusting might not be _hard_ work but she was feeling a bit tired from hauling all of the stacks of books that morning.

"Hullo," she called cheerfully over to him.

It was hard to read his expression in the dimming light of twilight.

"Did you have fun at the market, Fenris?" she asked, turning her attention back down to the volume in her hand and flipping it open to skim the contents to ascertain whether it went into the History pile or the section for Natural Philosophy.

"I did _not_ ," he said in a brusque, clipped tone. "The merchants there all refused to sell to me anything beyond ten silvers, even when I had ready money to pay for it. A number of them threatened to call the City Guard."

"Then why were you out so long?" she asked in surprise. "It's not like you to put up with fools when you don't need to."

"A few of them _did_ call the city guard and demand that I return the money I'd clearly stolen," Fenris growled. "Aveline lectured me down at the guard house about keeping a low profile."

"Oh," she said, sending him a sympathetic look and forcing her eyes to keep from staring at his markings. "I'm sorry that happened to you, would you like for me to make you something to eat?"

She felt a little uncomfortable now, as she possessed the knowledge of how those markings had gotten there, and she felt self-conscious about it. On the upside, she did find that she had a newer supply of patience with him that came from the thought of how difficult it must be to live with the discomfort of them day in and day out.

"I believe I shall retire for now and..." He frowned even more deeply. "Are you staring?"

"N-No!" she said quickly, tearing her eyes away from the brands on his chin and busying herself with dusting the book in her hand. "Just... organizing these books so I can put them back in the library properly."

Fenris surveyed her little mountain range of stacked books and snorted, turning away to go and sulk in his lair.

It suddenly and almost miraculously occurred to Merrill, who knew even of herself that sometimes when it came to other people she could be a bit dense, that Fenris might be feeling a bit hurt by having been arrested for having money despite it belonging to him. Essentially, he had been arrested just because he was an elf. That had to hurt, moreso because he'd been a slave and now he thought of himself as a freeman, thus would feel that he should be entitled to the same privileges as any other free man enjoyed, including the right to spend whatever coin he had on whatever he wanted. It had to rankle deeply that there was still limitations on his hard-won freedom. She had no idea, however, what one was to do with a surly elf whose feelings had been bruised.

_:Perhaps some tea and sympathy?_ : she fretted to herself, pacing a bit.

She wasn't sure he liked tea. And Fenris, it had been proven, didn't seem to respond well to sympathy either, at least not of the type Merrill knew how to give which came in the form of attempts at emotional connection.

_:Maybe something tasty instead...:_ she thought. _:He likes tasty things.:_

Most of what she knew how to cook were basic Dalish dishes that any Keeper might use to feed a clan. Almost all of her go-to recipes consisted of various soups and stews, as those were the easiest to feed large groups of people with. She thought briefly of asking Lucien to find a Spirit in the Fade who was good at cooking to help her learn to cook the better and more fancy recipes in the cookbooks she'd discovered in the library she'd cleaned... but after a long, intensely tempted moment, she decided against the idea based on the fact that she'd promised Fenris she wouldn't do any magic he'd object to... and she knew he would object to summoning Spirits from the Fade into the kitchen.

_:But what can I do to make him feel better?:_ Merrill wondered helplessly.

She was a mage and he hated magic, so the one thing in her life she was actually good at and had confidence in was out of the question with him. She couldn't give him a book because she knew he couldn't read and bringing up such a touchy subject so that she could try to soothe his heart about it would only get her snapped and snarled at by him.

_:I just don't know what might make him happy...:_ she thought a bit morosely. _:Just like I don't know what would make the alienage elves, or my old Clan for that matter, happy. After all I'm sure he's already irritable because of his--:_

Merrill cut herself off as a brilliant solution occurred to her. She knew those markings of his had to be a constant source of low-level irritation for him, and knowing Fenris, it wouldn't have occurred to him to try any salves or remedies (particularly if there were magic in them!) to try to alleviate the pain. Merrill could make him up something to help with the lingering discomfort in is skin. Having that lingering low-level pain taken from him would surely put him in a better frame of mind.

  
_:Maybe it might even make him smile!:_ Merrill thought hopefully. _:But the sun is westering, so if I want to get the ingredients I'll need to whip up an alleviant, I'll need to hurry before the shops close up for the night!:_

Suiting action to thought, Merrill scampered back to the library to raid the safe, betting that Fenris had not taken _all_ of the available coin for his earlier excursion. If she hurried, she should just be able to make it to the fine herbal boutique that sold the high quality imported herbs before it closed! Snatching out a pouch, Merrill called over to Lucien and Pontius to guard the house while she was gone and she'd be back soon.

The Dalish pariah hurried through the streets of lowtown and up the steps to Hightown, and made it to the herbalists shop in the High Market, the one that sold the really expensive imports of rare and difficult to procure herbs like Crystal Grace and Amrita Vein just before it closed. The shop was manned, not by an elf who did all of the work, but by a long-nosed, rather pompous-looking shemlen wearing what even she recognized to be clothes that were several cuts above his supposed station in life. In short he looked both pompous and pretensious, and the look he gave her upon entering his shop did nothing to alleviate her impression of him. Merrill looked at the collections of drawers and boxes and fancy little tins and realized with a dawning sense of delight that she could literally purchase the whole shop if she cared to and wouldn't even feel the pinch in her purse-strings! She could buy any type of herb she wanted, in any quantity and not have to go and fetch it from the woods herself! Living in the city was truly convenient if one had the coin to take advantage of it. It was a bit of a revelation.

_:I could make so much medicine!:_ she marveled privately. _:Just think of all the salve and tinctures I could make for the Alienage! Surely they'd stop being so cross with me if I showed up with medicines to help out.:  
_

She was making the best of things with Fenris, but her heart was still bruised by having been rejected by her new adopted people. She desperately wished to find a way to make friends with them, but she was very much afraid that they'd all look at her and see nothing but trouble on their doorstep. There had to be something she could do, some way she could help them!

But first things first, Merrill had come to the shop with a mission in mind, two if she counted the idea of picking up some seedlings for the plant she intended to Keeper-craft, and she should be about it quickly. The shop attendant, a tall shem who was thin as a rail, looked down his long pointy nose at her like she was possibly soiling something by her mere presence.

"We only serve paying customers," he said in an officious tone. "If charity is your aim, best you go on down to the Chantry."

His assumption put Merrill's back up and she straightened her spine from its former uncertain hunch and found herself meeting his eyes with her very best Marethari Face, the one her Keeper had once used to cow recalcitrant Hunters into obedience with, and said

"In the unlikely event _you'd_ ever offer charity out of the goodness of your heart," she said, being so displeased with him to allow her tone to imply that she did not believe he possessed any such goodness. "I wouldn't need it anyway, for I've coin to pay with."

She presented her heavy pouch as proof of her claim.

"Where'd you get it?" the shopkeeper demanded suspiciously.

Made wary now both by Fenris' earlier account and by Aveline's admonitions, Merrill replied

"I'm here on behalf of another."

Which wasn't entirely a lie. She was here of Fenris' behalf, whether he knew it or not. The shopkeeper sniffed, but apparently thought that that was a good enough reason to accept coin from a mere elf.

_:I'd rather like to turn him into a **goat**!:_ Merrill thought in irritated rebellion.

She then took some small relish in making the unpleasant shopkeeper flitter about his shop, filling in her orders, knowing that he resented having to do the bidding of a mere elf but also that the money she was apparently prepared to spend in his shop was going to set him up for the night. For once, Merrill found herself bargaining sharply with him for every last copper because she got the very distinct feeling from the man that he was trying to charge her more than what he would have made another, more _shemlen_ person, pay for the same herbs and seeds. Most of the time, Merrill was less sharp about haggling simply because she felt that the person selling the item to her needed the money to live on and it seemed wrong of her not to try to help him out however she could, but the officious shopkeeper had not engendered any goodwill in Merrill and she found herself feeling uncharacteristically uncaring as to whether or not those herbs were his source of livelihood! By the time Merrill told over her coin, and double-checked the receipt he'd made out for her for the weights of herbs and seeds she'd bought from him, her market basket was overflowing with paper packets, tiny bags, and little decorative tins filled with herbs. She'd also purchased a large chunk of high-quality beeswax, and several small urns of plain oils as well as some scented oils for the salves she wished to make for Fenris, Nalkolyte for bath-salts, and a few bottles of strong alcoholic spirits for making tinctures and salves with. She hurried home through the near-dark streets with her purchases and went immediately into the kitchen through the side door at the garden, thinking that she'd need to repair the side-gate and restore the wards on it.

:Now... what would work best for him,: she wondered as she spread her purchases out on the large, stone counter underneath the window near the hearth.

Merrill had to reveiw in her mind the particulars about the awful procedure that the magister had done on Fenris to graft the lyrium into his skin that she had learned from that grimoire in the hidden library so that she could come up with the right mixture of herbs to address his pain appropriately.

"Amrita Vein is a must, it's expensive, but I bought lots..." she muttered to herself as she laid out her purchases on the counter, sorting through the ones she thought she was likely to need for her infusion and what she was not going to need.

"Elfroot of course, for the base, and Prophet's Laurel and Black Lotus might be good for its lyrium-enhancing effects, Embrium, maybe Royal Elfroot and Arbor Blessing too..."

She mentally sorted through the effects of each herb and whether it was likely to have a counter-effect interaction with any of the others. Usually most common salve-recipes only carried one of the ingredients, mostly in the interests of expediency and simplicity (as well as, apparently, expense!). Keeper Marethari had used to make salves for the clan, but she'd mostly used whatever herbs were in the area or that she'd had stored away. Merrill was a practiced nature mage with the accumulated lore of medicines that would have enabled her to look after her clan appropriately and she judged that it would likely be safe to mix them.

_:Still, I suppose it doesn't hurt to get a second opinion.:_

"Lucien?" she called over to the hearth-spirit.

"Yeah, missie?" the spirit asked in reply, flickering over his stone, eyes shining up at her.

"Do you know whether I could mix together Amrita Vein, Prophets Laurel, Black Lotus, Embrium, Elfroot and Arbor Blessing for a salve? I've done salves with one or two of them in them, but never all of them. I'm wondering if it would be perfectly safe."

"I dunno," Lucien replied. "But I could consult with some other Spirits and find out if you'd like."

"Oh, would you?" Merrill asked. "That'd be a help."

"Sure thing!" the spirit replied.

The healthy-sized fire in the hearth dimmed down to an ember-like glow and the glow turned green, signalling that the Veil was now thin and the Spirit was communing with his brethren on the other side. Merrill puttered about with her herbs debated with herself whether she should used the common olive oil or the rarer and more expensive "Lady's Sigh" oil that the shopkeeper had pressed her into buying by saying that it was apparently all the rage in Orlais. Merrill would have preferred if he'd had a good portion of some proper elven chea butter but apparently the perfectly good and useful substance was considered "too elven" and its use was eschewed by the foolish shemlen.

While waiting for Lucien to return from his information-gathering trip, Merrill rummaged about for the empty salve-containers she'd also purchased from the reluctant merchant and set about sanitizing them properly in anticipation of needing them soon. In addition, she'd also decided that making him some salts for him to bathe with certainly could do his skin no harm, and daily contact with the infusing oils would probably be more effective than the occasional use of salves when his markings became too difficult to ignore. Fenris was the sort of man who'd only take his medicine when he could no longer avoid it, and nevermind that using said medicine as a daily preventative would be more effective!

_:Or maybe it's just men in general that are that way!:_ Merrill reflected to herself as she considered what the the wives in the Alienage had had to say about their husbands, brother's and sons.

The hearth flared up a bit and the veilfire returned to normal as Lucien returned from the other side of the Veil.

"I asked around," he reported. "The general consensus is that you should use a mixture of Royal and regular elfroot as a base taking up a full third of your mix, then make one third an equal mix of Amrita Vein, Black Lotus, and Embrium but also use powdered Porphyrite as a fixant. Make the final third a full portion of Prophets Laurel. The other Spirits I asked about it said that this should be an effective recipe that won't counteract its own ingredients."

"Oh, well thank you very much Lucien," Merrill said happily, as she pulled out a kitchen spice-scale and began to weigh and measure out portions according to the guide given to her.

The Keeper in her was wary about using up ingredients in a single batch, just in case the Clan might need it in the future, but Merrill forcibly reminded herself that she lived in the city now and wouldn't have to run about the forest hunting her own herbs, she could simply find an herbalist shop and purchase what she needed.

The Dwarven stove proved its usefulness in the next hour for Merrill was able to minutely adjust the temperature without first having to build up the fire, wait for it to die down to embers, and then watch those embers like a hawk to make certain they did not get too cold. Nor did she have to risk raising the temperature by adding more wood when the embers eventually did grow colder. Merrill could focus her concentration on slowly and gently infusing the herbal mixture with her magic to make certain that every ingredient combined just right and that the whole could contain the extra infusion of magic. Merrill could also use her magic to hurry along the infusion process so in a short hour and a half, the herbs were infused into the oil and ready to be strained out through the cheesecloth. She melted the beeswax with her magic rather than risk burning it to the bottom of the pot, Lucien deftly kept the flames at just the right warmth throughout the combining process, and Merrill slowly and carefully stirred in most of the infused oils to mix with the soft beeswax and scented oil to make Fenris' salve. She placed the hot-warm salve into the sanitized, wide-mouthed jars to cool and tuned her attention to the last part of the infused oil she'd kept out with the intention of making bathing salts.

Most simply mixed a variety of salt-minerals, sea-salt, nakolyte and whatever oils or herbs they wished. Merrill liked to use her magic to melt it into liquid, infuse it with her magic as well as the oils and herbs she wanted to use and then re-crystalize it back into salt. And so she did, using her magic to enhance the properties of the oil and herbs she put into the mixture and adding in a few extra minerals, such as powdered Volcanic Aurum, and Drakestone (neither of which would do well in salve, but were well known among the Dalish for their health benefits). She also added in something that merely smelled pleasant (but wouldn't go badly with the other herbs she'd used) to encourage Fenris to use the salts regularly (hopefully!). In another hour she pulled out the water and flash-crystalized her soothing mixture, with a feeling of satisfaction as the bonds of the minerals clicked into place properly. She put the lovely-scented healing-salt into her last wide-mouthed jar and checked the salves to find that they'd cooled completely and were ready to be given as a gift.

As a final touch, because she'd seen other people do so when they gave gifts, Merrill tied colored ribbons around the lips of the jars underneath the stoppers which would hopefully entice Fenris into wanting to accept them... rather than lob them back at her head in a fit of temper.

_:Surely I'm exaggerating his temper,:_ Merrill chided herself about the uncharitibility of her own thoughts toward her housemate.

Fenris was temperamental and cranky, but he wasn't incapable of gratitude or thought towards others. He'd proven himself a dependable ally and a dutiful friend, and his honor, while a touchy thing, was as good (or better) than gold. Still, Merrill couldn't help but feel nervous as she took up a tray piled with the warmed up remains of dinner the night previous, a few fresh rolls she'd made while waiting for her oils to infuse, a bottle of wine (also from the night previous) and the gift she'd made for him, one jar each of the salve and the salts to start with.

Merrill tried not to make her knock timid when she reached his door.

"What is it?" Fenris demanded from within his lair.

Merrill's first reaction was to interpret his tone as censorious, think that he already hated her gift, berate herself for pressing in where she was not wanted and run back to her little corner of the house and the safety of her nice, supportive hearth-fire Spirit. Still, she'd come all this way, and even if he didn't like it at first, it would be unkind of her not to at least tell him that she'd made something for him. And he was probably wanting his dinner too.

"Fenris? May I come in?" Merrill asked cautiously, trying not to sound timorous.

"I had thought we had agreed you would keep to your end of the manse and I to mine," he growled.

"Well, yes... but... I thought, I mean, there's something you might...and food too," she stammered.

There was an audible put-upon sigh and the soft sound of movement within. The door opened and Fenris looked out with his customary frown in place.

"What's this?" he demanded, looking pointedly at the jars with ribbons on them.

"I made you something. I, um, I saw you scratching earlier," Merrill lied. "And I thought your skin might be bothering you."

She removed the stopper from the salve-jar.

"This is made with herbs that are well known for their healing and regenerative properties and there's herbs in there that are used for... um, for lyrium, that is, it's supposed to... with you skin the way it is and all I thought maybe..."

She trailed off.

"And if you want I made a nice-smelling salt for your bath with lots of good minerals and herbs for soothing and... well, you don't have to take them if you don't like them I just thought maybe... that is..."

She trailed off again, feeling utterly certain by his unwavering frown that she'd just made yet another mistake when dealing with him. Maybe he hated gifts?

_:Or at least gifts that don't involve the ability to stab other people with them,:_ she thought nervously.

"Nevermind," she said a bit dejectedly. "You can just have the food. You don't have to accept it-"

Merrill squeaked in surprise when the tray was abruptly jerked out of her hands, bath-salts and all.

"I assume you have tested this... substance out on yourself, and my skin will not rot and fall off from my bones?" he demanded gruffly as he turned to re-enter his quarters.

Merrill held out her hand, palm down, to show him the spot where she put the still-warm salve on her own skin and hour before to make certain it would not harm him. In fact, the slight healing-tingle felt very pleasant.

He sniffed, examining the area minutely to make certain it was safe before he put it on his own skin. His frown lessened, though of course he did not smile, but Merrill chose to take it as a sign of approval.

"You... you seemed a bit upset about what happened in the market so I thought this might cheer you up," Merrill ventured shyly. "I know it's not really to your taste but... I hope it works well for you and helps you feel better."

Fenris treated her to that narrow, searching gaze of his, as though he suspected her of possible duplicitous motives, then heaved a small short sigh and shook his head, almost apparently at himself.

"It is a generous and kindly gesture witch," he said in an acknowledging tone. "I will thank you... _if_ it works."

With that, he shut the door in her face. Merrill wasn't angry though. If it worked, she'd hear words of gratitude from him! She wasn't certain if she'd even heard a thank-you fall from Fenris lipsfor all of the heard work she had done to restore and repair his home. The irascible elf was notoriously proud and exceedingly reluctant to have anything approaching cordiality with mages, Merrill in particular because of her choice to pursue blood magic in order to help her clan.

_:But, perhaps that will change and we can learn to live together and get along like a proper Clan,:_ Merrill thought hopefully to herself. _:With the elves of the alienage still so uncertain about my magic and whether or not I could be of any good to thier community, Fenris is realistically the only sort of Clan I have for the moment, however reluctant he is. It is a little bit sad that it always feels like I have to fight for everything. I only want to help. It would be so nice if something could just work out for once.:_

She still had a lot yet that she wanted to do. She wanted to help the elves of the alienage, but she wasn't quite certain how yet. She had a few ideas but they all rested on her being a lot farther along in the development of her own research than she was. She had the library all put back together which woud give her a place to study and conduct her research, so... it was a start, but she still had a ways yet to go.

_:Try not to be so hard on yourself Merrill,:_ she told herself optimistically. _:You're barely twenty-five. You've already picked apart and studied the eluvians for nearly a decade and you have so much other research that you've done. No-one ever heard of a twenty-five year old who was master of everything. It just takes time and work.:_

 

Merrill went back down to her kitchen to clear up her mess only to discover that Pontius had beaten her to it, having cleaned up the dishes she'd dirtied in the process of making the salve and salts. He'd left her basket full of herbs, seeds and tea-mixtures where she had left it and Merrill spent and enjoyable half-hour in the still-room off the kitchen putting herbs into tins, labeling them and putting them away on shelves, promising herself a good re-stocking and supply run. She pulled down a book from the shelf to take to bed with her, a study of Dwarven Mechanical principles rather than a history or another book about magic, it was good to have a variety of knowledge and one never knew when she might extrapolate something useful to a problem from another source. 

_:One benefit, I suppose, of having moved away to the city,:_ she thought as she curled up in her bed with a globe of wisplight hovering over her hear chortling with wispy glee at the little mobile she'd hung up to keep it amused with while she read. _:If I had stayed among the Dalish, I would never have had such ready access to works beyond what the Dalish deem worthy of collecting, which is hardly every anything other than some piece of lore about the ancient elves of Arlathan.:_

The wonders of the ancient world were mysterious and fascinating, but the longer she studies their workings, the more certain that Merrill had become that htere was something fundamentally different in the nature of magic itself that had enabled them to create their wonders, and that this fundamental difference made it impossible for thier wonders to be re-created in modern times, in exactly the same way.

_:I'm nothing if not a problem-solver though,:_ she thought over a yawn. _:If it can be done one way, then it can be adapted to suit another purpose. I just need enough solid knowledge.:_


	12. Chapter 12

The next morning saw Merrill making a simpler breakfast of porridge with nuts and dried berries in it, an egg scramble, toasted bread with cheese, hashed tatoes, and morning tea to fortify her for the hard work she faced that day. She planned to finish the library, which meant that all of those books would need to be hauled back across the house and placed on the shelves in order this time.

Fenris sauntered into the kitchen, sleepy-faced and mussy-haired, not even bothering to dress himself fully.

_:He could at **least** put a shirt on!:_ Merrill groused to herself.

No hunter in _her_ clan would ever have expected his Keeper to feed him if he could not show the respect of common courtesy. She was half-tempted to tell him that there would be no breakfast for him until he dressed himself properly, but quickly decided against it on the grounds that the poor man had been denied food in the past and Merrill did not wish to dredge up old memories from his Danarius days.

"Did you try out the salve?" Merrill asked instead, vitally curious.

"I did," he said with a nod.

"And?" Merrill leaned forward eagerly.

Fenris made a show of looking critically at his outstretched arm.

"It seems that it has not made my skin rot or my limbs fall from my body. Yet."

Merrill was uncertain how to take this less than stellar review.

"Indeed," he continued. "I can detect a notable difference on the arm that did try your be-demoned medicine as opposed to the arm that did not. I...there has been some, minor discomfort, _very_ minor mind you, in the skin along my markings since Hawke departed, taking that terrorist mage with him. I have, in the past been forced to consult the abomination for Healing when the discomfort had become too severe. Had a known that all I needed to do was smear salve on it, I would much rather have done so."

Merrill barely caught herself from replying that one, the salve she'd made for him would have been ruinously expensive, and two, it was infused with magic so thus it probably was not something that could be bought from even a very very high-end medicinal vendor, unless said vendor wanted to admit to trafficking with mages.

"I'm happy it makes you feel well, Fenris," Merrill said sincerely, all but leaning across the table in anticipation of the promised praises to come.

"What?" he demanded next, looking over at her hopeful, expectant look. "What is it?"

"You said last night, Fenris," Merrill replied. "That if it worked, you would thank me."

"And so I did," he replied, sighing a bit as though faced with an onerous task.

"I'm half tempted to tell Lucien to capture the sound of your gratitude so I can listen to it again later, maybe every morning to celebrate the victory!"

Fenris gave her a look that was decidedly odd, but snorted, seeming almost amused.

"Well done, witch," he muttered. "And I thank you for your consideration."

Merrill felt a small burst of happiness at unmitigated gratitude finally fall from his lips, and directed at _her_!

"Oh you're welcome Fenris!" she chirped happily. "I was happy to help."

She stopped herself before she could continue to babble on, at last catching on that she should probably quit while she was ahead and that Fenris disliked chatter. Besides, she still had work left to do that day and time was wasting.

"I assume you have plans for all of those books in the atrium," Fenris said in a prompting tone.

"Well I'm not going to leave them all piled up on the floor if that's what you're wondering," Merrill replied. "I got a good bit done yesterday. Pontius has the rest of the shelves to dust and wash off, and I'm probably going to need to take the whole day to clean all of the rest of the books, then sort them out. After they're sorted, I can start to put them back on the shelves. How about you? Any plans?"

Fenris shrugged.

"When I visited the guard house yesterday it seemed like Aveline might have enough loose hands to form a party to sweep the wilds nearby."

"I haven't heard of any new battles between the rebel mages and the Templars in the area," Merrill said, brow furrowed in puzzlement.

"One need not be a mage or a templar to be a nuisance on the road," Fenris replied with a shrug. "The guards are always glad of an extra hand, though I suppose that considering my monetary status now, it is not so necessary that I work for coin, but one should have something to do with ones day, otherwise time weighs heavily."

Merrill nodded in agreement and approval of the statement. She disliked feeling at loose ends herself, and had rather begun to drift about since the permanent loss of her place with her Clan and the her rejection by the Alieange elves. If Merrill were perfectly and entirely honest with herself, she would have admitted that her sudden desire to come and clean up and repair Fenris' Mansion had not only been born out of gratitude, but out of a need for her to be doing something useful with her time. In fact, perhaps her ongoing projects were just an extension of that, a need to fill her days.

"Fenris," she said idly. "If you were an elf who had been raised to serve a people and suddenly found yourself without any people to serve, what would you do?"

The often-surly warrior looked over at her in surprise and puzzlement.

"Witch?" he questioned, frowing.

"I mean, hypothetically, of course," she hastened to add, not wanting him to think that this was about her.

"Oh, of course," he said dryly, clearly not in the least bit fooled. "And what would be this hypothetical problem?"

"Well, hypothetically. A person might have been raised from birth to think of herself as a servant to her people, that her gift existed to protect, say, a Clan perhaps. And she doesn't have a clan anymore, and she thought she'd adopted a new people... but they don't like her either. What do you think she should do with herself if she has no other people to serve?"

Fenris grunted a sigh and scratched his head.

"I have no answer for you, witch, even having faced a similar situation," he replied. "One must find their own purpose."

"Oh," she said in disappointment. "But most people seem to hate it when I find my own purpose. My Keeper didn't like me restoring the eluvian--"

That's because you made bargains with demons, witch," he pointed out.

"Audacity was a Spirit, Fenris," Merrill replied. "Much corrupted, I'll grant, but it's heart was a Spirit of Courage, a Spirit of those who dared to be different and had to strength to forge thier own path even if it went against what everyone else told them to do."

"And look where that path took you," he pointed out.

Merrill's temper began to spark a bit at his condescending tone about the terrible way that everything had suddenly gone all wrong in her life. She hadn;t been having any troubles with the demon or the blood magic, and if her Keeper hadn't decided to intercede, she might have gotten somewhere with the eluvian, and her Keeper would still be alive.

"Ah, I'm sorry," Merrill bit out in irritation. "I had forgotten that I was speaking to a man who has never made any wrong decisions in his life, nor ever been subject to the actions of others."

Merrill bowed stiffly and rose from the table, stalking out of the room before she said something she would truly regret.

_:So much for trying to connect with him,:_ she thought, turning back to her books. _:All he ever does is throw my mistakes back in my face!:_

After breakfast, Fenris fastened on his armor, strapped his sword to his back and took himself off for the day, with a last scowling look at her which she affected to be indifferent to in the interests of keeping the peace in thier little clan. After he'd left, Merrill tied her neck-kerchief around her head ala Isabella and dove into her task for the day.

The Atrium was full in all corners with books. Some piles were bigger than others, notably, the mage who had inhabited the house previously had liked to collect books of history, natural philosophy, folklore and philosophies, but when it came to things like Musical Studies, Architecture and Mathematics the pickings were notably sparse. She figured it was due to one of two causes, either the previous tenant had not been interested in such studies in the first place or they had all gotten used for kindling or toilet paper during the houses derelict phase before Fenris had taken up residence. Either way, Merrill steadily made in roads on the mountain of miscellaneous books. She spent her morning cleaning, scanning and sorting and found her clothes utterly covered in dust by the time it was time to break for lunch. At her mid-day break Merrill peeked into the emptied library to check on Pontius' progress in dusting and cleaning the intricate woodwork of the shelves to discover that he was already at the top of the second to last shelf in the room, all of the other shelves having been meticulously cleaned from top to bottom.

_:Those shelves with filthy, he must have been at it all night!_ : Merrill marveled to herself. _:But I suppose, as a Spirit or magical construct, or whatever he his, he wouldn't really need to eat or rest would he?:_

The polished wood floor gleamed, the enormous thickly piled red floor-rugs woven with Tevinter arabesques had been taken somewhere and very thoroughly cleaned, the wood floors beneath them gleamed in the light and there was the smell of wax strongly suggesting that said floor had been polished overnight. The brass sconces that held mage-lamps had even been polished though the front of the room was conspicuously empty-looking from having had the rats-nest infested furniture taken out of it. There was the wondrous buit-in mechanical map-table in the center of the room, and the desk at the back flanked by two great burnished metal Tevinter statues holding up mage-lamps for the person at the desk to read with.

_:Once I'm finished with cleaning and sorting all of the books, I'll be able to shelve them all properly right away!:_ Merrill thought with cheerful excitement as she took herself off to the kitchen to make herself something for her mid-day meal.

After a quick luncheon of cold sausage, onion and spicy mustard on bread Merrill got straight back to cleaning and sorting the massive piles of books and was surprised to detect an unusual sound when she'd turned to place another book in a stack of books on Empathic Studies. Curious, Merrill craned her head in the direction she'd detected the sound, and then blinked in surprise to discover Pontius had found a wheel barrow somewhere and had diligently begun to place her sorted piles of books into the barrow and wheel them back to the library in order to begin shelving them!

Merrill partly wanted to protest that she wasn't done sorting the books and they shouldn't move things only half done, but then reconsidered the thought. It would do no harm to start moving the books in the library and stacking them into the assigned sections even though she was only part way through. This sorting was preliminary anyway, and chances were very very good that once she got all of them on the shelves she'd only rearrange them to her satisfaction later, Creators knew she had done so with her little library she'd made in her own home! Well, back before it had burned down and she'd lost all of the books she'd accumulated over the years... Merrill still felt a deep pang at the loss. While it was true that a number of those books had been studies of a forbidden and dangerous nature (which she had certainly been careful of!) a large number of them had been books for her to learn new things and assuage her curiosity with, and many of them had been simply for the pleasure of reading.

_:But now I have a whole new library of books to read,:_ she consoled herself.

True, it wasn't going to have the same books in it, unless Merrill herself went out and bought copies of them, but she enjoyed learning new things and stretching her mind and imagination, so all in all, perhaps it was not entirely bad to have lost her former home and library.

They kept at the project all day and on into the night until Merrill, tired and sore in her feet and calves called a halt and went to the kitchen to make herself a delayed dinner. She was pleased, when she surveyed her work, to note that the mountain of unsorted books had shrunk to a mere molehill, and that three quarters of the already sorted books had been trundled back into the library and put onto the shelves she had indicated she that wanted them to occupy by a tireless and industrious Pontius.

"I'll need to visit the market for fresh supplies before too much longer," she mused aloud to Lucien as she prepared another simple dish of fried hard-sausage with herbs and vegetables, brad-rolls, cheese and a nice tea to wash it down with.

Lucien munched happily on the fried hard-sausage she tossed his way and made murmurs of agreement, mostly about expanding their available food.

The staples would last for a while longer, she judged, but the perishables had been consumed rather more quickly than she had reckoned with even when she had sent Fenris out on his mission to get dinner supplies. She was considering the matter of a bath after dinner when she sensed Fenris let himself back in through the wards and head immediately to the kitchen. She had already resolved to herself that she was going to let their little not-quite-a-tiff from earlier that morning go, and start off on a fresh new footing with him. After all, his markings probably made him irritable, and he didn't have the practice of being in a clan to teach him how to prooerly behave when around people. Merrill had grown up with her clan practically living in her lap for her whole life, but Fenris sharing his lair and life with another was new to him, and he was probably still adjusting.

"Hullo Fenris!" Merrill greeted cheerfully when he appeared. "How went the hunt today?"

"Fruitless," he replied, sounding a bit weary but not upset.

It seemed that he too, was willing to let the matter from earlier be forgotten.

"And how is your skin feeling?" she asked next, curious as to whether he had continued to treat his skin with the salve she'd made for him.

"It is well," he said unhelpfully.

"May I have a look?" she asked, trying to be delicate. "I might be ale to make some adjustments to the next recipe based on how well your skin feels on this trial."

Fenris frowned at her for the least implication that he was some sort of test subject. Merrill knew he'd gotten that sort of treatment to the back teeth from his hated former master, but Merrill was trying to help him and she couldn't do that without examining his progress and the effects of the salve.

"It's nothing invasive so don't look so cross with me before I've even had a chance," Merrill preempted him. "I just want to see how it's doing, and maybe find a way to make it even better and more helpful to you. I can't do that without having a look."

Fenris narrowed his eyes suspiciously at her.

"You just want a closer look at my brands..." he growled wolfishly at her.

"Now now," Merrill soothed, barely catching herself from saying she didn't need a closer look at his brands when she had a step by step grimoire from their original author to study if she so chose. No way was she _ever_ telling Fenris about that book, chances were he'd burn it _and_ the rest of the library as well, for good measure!

"If you don't want to I won't press, but I really do just want to help," she added.

Maybe she should stomach having another look at that awful grimoire again, just to see if there was some information in there that would help her with reducing the negative effects of the lyrium grafted into his skin. However, Merrill was for once, _not_ tempted by curiosity... the images that her imagination supplied to go along with that awful man's notes was enough to turn her stomach.

Fenris said nothing more as he helped himself to the last of the dinner she'd prepared and sat to eat it, indicating neither yes nor a flat-out no, which would have been his usual reaction, so Merrill decided that the best course was to let him mull the matter over in peace until he'd come to a decision on it.

_:Since he seems to like quiet so much, I am capable of giving it to him,:_ Merrill thought with the intention of outwaiting his decision.

Merrill had brought a particularly intriguing book called "Green Days: Being A Compendium of the Pants Magickal, Theory of Origins and Uses" she'd found among the books that she had brought  into the kitchen to read, so she buried herself into the book to let her housemate enjoy his meal in the silence she knew that he preferred.

Merrill had always been a swift and voracious reader, and when she read she'd always found herself inside her own little world, so she was much surprised when she found a shadow blocking out her reading light and the sound of a throat clearing just over her shoulder. Merrill blinked for a long moment, the spell over her senses that reading always cast dissipating slowly, and was surprised to find Fenris peering at the pages she'd been reading.

"That," he said flatly. "Is Tevinter in Origin. I can recognize some of the letters."

"Oh, I suppose it is," Merrill said absently, impatient to return to the chapter she had been reading about the theorized origins of Felandaris.

"I was unaware that you read Tevene, you certainly do not speak it," Fenris pursued.

Merrill tamped down on her irritation at the continuing interruption of her reading but it must have leaked through in her expression, for her housemate looked somewhat surprised at her. Usually it was Fenris being annoyed at _her_ continuing chatter and being badly transparent about wishing her elsewhere.

"Reading and speaking are different, Fenris," Merrill replied, not bothering to close her book. "No-one to correct your accent for one. The words are always the same and you can take your time conjugating or look them up if you need to. I was taught to read the writing of Tevinter by my Keeper when I was quite young, along with many of the other written languages. A Keepers job is to remember and to restore what she can. Other cultures have taken our histories and artifacts for themselves and studied them, a wise Keeper must be able to study and translate in many tongues in order to learn about the lost elven history as preserved by the other races."

The book was not, in fact the modern writing of Tevinter but was instead High Arcanum, which was used for nearly all of Tevinter's most scholarly tracts. Merrill did not know how to speak modern Tevene, in fact. An ignorance which was exposed a moment later when Fenris said a long string of syllables that sounded vaguely familiar but Merrill couldn't understand them.

"I _don't_ speak Tevene," she replied shortly, wishing to turn back to the section she had been reading about the internal codex of the Felandaris.

"You can read High Arcanum, and yes, I _do_ know the difference," he said. "But you cannot speak Tevene?"

Fenris sounded so condescending and smug about the fact that he could do something scholarly that she failed at. Stung to have her scholarly skills, of which she was so proud, maligned by him, Merrill replied in elven, and switched to Nevvarran midway through. Her Nevarran was rusty as she had not really used the language much since she had left her mothers Clan at six to study under Marethari, but her Keeper had urged her not to let the language fall aside in her mind so Merrill had obediently practiced every now and again. She was rewarded by seeing Fenris blink in surprise. Having sufficiently proved that her scholastic skills were _not_ to be underestimated, Merrill tried to return to her book.

"That is a felandaris plant," Fenris noted next, hanging over her shoulder and peering at the detailed illustration on the page opposite which contained both the over all view of the whole plant and panels that detailed enlarged views of its parts.

"Yes, Fenris, it is," Merrill replied a bit curtly.

"I suppose that book must tell you that it is used most often in tonics, particularly that when mixed with certain other herbs, enhances resistances to fire and spiritual attacks, as well as being a key ingredient in the substance known as Antivan Fire," he said proudly.

It was Merrill's turn to blink in surprise. She'd never heard anything the least bit scholarly from his lips and it felt rather like being faces with a wolf that had learned to speak.

"I didn't know you had herb-lore," she said.

"Ah..." Fenris hesitated. "I was hired as a bodyguard once while I was on the run for a man who trafficked in herbs and potions... mostly _illegal_ ones as it turns out. He liked to fill the hours with chatter about his craft, and I saw an opportunity to learn something useful. Sadly, the knowledge was not as useful as I had hoped, for it turns out that it requires the skill of a mage or a Tranquil to extract the useful qualities from plants touched by magic in order to make potions of them."

"That is true," Merrill agreed. "The Dalish believe that the Felandaris plant combines with the mind somehow to enhance the body's natural aura and it's resistance to the worlds magical field. Thus it enhances an individual's resistance to magic, but it requires the intervention of certain secondary ingredients to key and attune its properties to a particular..."

Fenris' eyes glazed over as Merrill warmed to her subject. She caught his budding disinterest and caught herself.

"I'm babbling, I'll stop," she said.

"You have the ability to create such potions? I assume you did so when you made that salve for me last night," he said instead.

"Yes," Merrill replied. "I have often made such things for the elves of the Alienage when they needed them. I'm Keeper-trained, but my magic has always been more attuned to nature and force-magic than it ever has been to Healing magic, but potions, oddly enough, come natural to me. Dalish lore focuses mostly on the practical, they don't seem to care so much how it works, only that it does, the fact that other cultures have studied and theorized and written down things about it is... more than I would have seen if I'd stayed at home. I'm not saying that I'm glad I left, but... I've always liked learning new things."

"Like blood magic," Fenris said flatly, and left the room on a sour note.

Merrill sighed and rolled her eyes, and turned back to her book.

:I do wonder how there will be any sort of living with him,: she thought to herself. :We're so very different.:

She pushed her misgivings aside and pulled out one of the fresh, large leatherbound notebooks she'd picked up on one of her shopping excursions and began making notes in the pages. The theory that his man had come to about the magical properties of the Felandaris and her own studies of the plants interior structure she'd noted down earlier seemed to confirm her guess that theplant had been tampered with magically in the past.

_:Too bad a number of my notebooks about the eluvian's spellwebs were lost when the alienage was destroyed,_ : Merrill thought.

She'd saved a number of her notebooks, which represented years of work to her, but the alienage had raged with fires for some time. Even when she'd chased of would-be Purgers, shem who were suffering and seemed to want to make the elves feel worse, with firestorm and lightning, it hadn't engendered her any goodwill among the elves. The opposite actually, they'd been afraid that her open practice of magic was going to bring them all trouble. Even more trouble. Though... oddly enough, there had been a vocal section tht remembered all of the little services she'd done for the alienage over the years, that had wanted to keep her around. Sadly, that section had been drowned out by those who were too afraid of what would happen if the Chantry and the shemlen got wind of the alienge harboring a mage... thus she'd been essentially chased off.

_:I wonder if there might be a way to learn more about these internal eluvian spell-webbing things,:_ she mused to herself as she continued to work late into the night on her theory-craft. _:Maybe Lucien knows something, or at least knows someone who knows about it. I suppose I could ask him one of these days.:_

It would be a project for a little bit later, however. Merrill had the library to finish, and then she had the garden to work on, and there was the experimental seedling-spell-tree that she wished to develop and further investigation and experimentation about the interior magical workings of the eluvian that she had studied. That should be more than enough to occupy her time for a little while, at least long enough for the Alienage elves to hopefully cool their tempers and consider that having a Keeper-trained mage working for them might in fact be a better thing than _not_ having a Keeper-trained mage working with them.


	13. Chapter 13

She regretted, a bit, that she had stayed up so late the night previous reading and making notes for her planned project with the plants, for when morning rolled around she wished nothing more than to pull the covers back over her head, roll over, and go back to sleep. She did so, but an hour later she found herself being poked none too gently by a pointy metal gauntlet in her side. Merrill yawned and looked over at her housemate with disfavor as he eyed her with a frown that matched her own.

"I am hungry, witch," he prompted, looking at her expectantly.

"Oh, well then, Your Majesty, I'll just assemble the staff and have them prepare a banquet for you shall I?" she grumbled at him, feeling cross and uncharitable with lack of sleep.

"You look a mess, and your eyes have circles under them," he noted bluntly. "Did you stay up all night? You look a sight when you have no sleep, like something that might be used to frighten small children."

Merrill, uncharacteristically, glared at him, and then caught on that he was taking the opportunity to ruffle her feathers and enjoying himself while doing so.

"Keep it up and I'll poison your porridge," she muttered without any heat.

"It wouldn't work anyway," he informed her. "My former master forced me to develop an immunity to most poisons. I was tasked with tasting his food."

"I dunno," Merrill said, pulling herself out of bed so she could make the man his breakfast. "I imagine I could get pretty creative if I'd a mind to."

Fenris abruptly jerked back and turned about face so fast she could swear she'd heard his head spin.

"What?" she asked, feeling a bit of distemper.

"You sleep naked," he replied, sounding affronted.

"Who sleeps in their clothes?" Merrill demanded. "That's the funniest thing I've ever heard of."

"It's normal in most _civilized_ parts of the world," he replied exiting her room.

"Well serves you right for walking in here and waking me," Merrill grumbled, pulling on her body-sheath and tabard. "And what about each of us sticking to our _own_ part of the house?"

"There's no breakfast and the morning has grown late," Fenris replied. "Had I known you were inclined to laze about all day in bed I would have brought a bucket."

"What for?" she asked, mystified.

"To douse you with."

Merrill walked past him into the kitchen telling herself that she was not feeling guilty for sleeping in so late. She was doing research. _Research_! Most of the perishables like the eggs and the cheese were all but gone now after the meals she'd constructed with them, so breakfast was a much simpler affair of toasted bread the last of the eggs and cheese and some porridge.

"If you want to help with the food situation Fenris, I could use your arms again. If the two of us go we can bring more back," she said over breakfast. "It's late enough that the market should be mostly cleared of its morning crowd."

"Meaning people with occupations have already been about their day for hours," he replied in a rather snide tone.

Merrill wanted to snap defensively that she'd gleaned a lot of notes for her own research from her reading the night before, so technically she _was_ doing work, but she knew he wouldn't care or more likely would still condemn her for her magic regardless.

"However," Fenris relented. "You are not entirely incorrect in judging the hour a fine one to shop in. While the stalls are often picked over of much of their finer wares, the vendors themselves can often be convinced to sell their wares much cheaper now than during the busy part of the day."

They not only brought the large gathering basket, but the rucksack with shoulder-straps that Merrill used when she had heavier items to carry. The market wasn't deserted, but it wasn't overly busy either. Perram, the enterprising young elven boy from the Alienage, perked up upon seeing her and immediately fell into step beside her.

"I see you're at it again," he said. "And you brought a friend! I figure I was so helpful the time before... maybe you'd need my help again?"

He looked plainly hopeful, and skinny. Merrill had rewarded him for his help in navigating the stalls and the haggling with a small handful of coppers the time before.

"We do not need our pockets picked for us, if that's what you mean," Fenris said suspiciously.

Perram scowled at Fenris and Merrill shushed the surly elf astonishingly.

"Don't mind him dear," Merrill soothed the young elf's injured pride. "He's not a people person. I'd be delighted to have you help me again."

Merrill less needed his help in finding her way around with Fenris there and more felt that the boy could use a few more coppers and a good meal. Helping Perram help himself fed that Keeper part of her that whispered in the back of her mind that she should always be helping her people. She felt another empty pang of loss at the thought that her people seemed to neither need nor want her help. She very much wished to ask how the Alienage was faring, but feared that the answer would be "not well," and that she was still not welcome to help them. Instead, Merrill turned her thoughts to the purchase of supplies.

_:Someday soon they'll want me. Surely,:_ she encouraged herself.

They pulled over to a spot in the shade while Merrill discussed with Perram what she might be looking for, though she herself wasn't entirely certain. Soup fixings of course, eggs, cheese, milk, butter, but beyond that... Fenris, however, seemed to have very decided opinions on what he would like to buy and for the lowest price possible. The boy looked a bit surly at the irrascible elf's list of demands, but seemed to have figured out that Fenris was the one with the purse strings and if Perram wanted his gratuity, it would behoove him to be polite.

They went from stall to stall then, and Perram haggled briskly over each item, often getting Merrill more food than she'd originally thought to buy simply by getting the vendor to agree to sell more of other wares at the stall at a higher overall price. It seemed Fenris was in favor of this tactic for he nodded subtly and told over the coin without a quibble but Merrill was mystified as to how spending more coin was getting a better bargain. Many of the vendors in the less common wares like cloth, metal works and glasswares of the practical sort then started trying to entice Merrill and Fenris and Perram over to their stalls with cries about the excellent quality of their goods.

"I've never had that happen before," Merrill murmured to Fenris in mystification, as one vendor of beaded jewelry tried to entice her and Fenris over to her stall, though what she thought Fenris might do with a pretty necklace when he did not at all look the sort to wear such things was anyone's guess so far as Merrill was concerned.

Fenris looked both bemused and irritated about something.

"What?" Merrill asked, picking up on his mood for once but not understanding the cause of it, as usual.

"They think that we are paired, Witch," he replied bluntly. "And that I will be enticed to buying useless trinkets to please you or sweeten your temper if we are fighting."

"Oh..." Merrill said, trying not to make a face at the idea of being paired with Fenris.

"If anyone's going to buy something to sweeten a certain someone's sour temper," Merrill added smartly. "It would be _me_."

Fenris frowned at her and she did not apologize for speaking the truth. He got away with quite enough disparaging comments, it wouldn't do him any harm to have someone tell him a little hard truth every now and again. Having finished their purchases, Merrill forced the two males she was in company with to stop at a booth that was utterly impractical, but that she'd had her eye on for some time.

The booth sold scented oils, tiny vials of them at exorbitant prices. She'd never bothered to do anything more than sniff appreciatively at whatever oil he'd had burning at the time, but now... well, she had extra coin and a whole list of things like soaps and salves and bathing salts to make. A little expenditure would not be amiss, surely. It would give her something pleasant to do when she was not occupied with her studes, besides, she had plenty of ash from the fire pits still and there was almost no soap in the house. The vendor looked surprised, but pleased, and Merrill spent a good long time wafting tiny vials under her nose and disusing the sorts of things she liked (and the sorts of things Fenris might like). Perram and Fenris, meanwhile, found a nearby booth selling bits of meat and vegetables on skewers, and another vendor that sold Tevinter-style flavored rice and some flatbread smeared in some thick, heavy paste and they bought wares from each and settled in a clear spot in the shade to enjoy their meal while Merrill selected the scents she wanted.

Lugging their purchases home, they were joined by Perram, who took the added load of supplies as the excuse he needed to codge another meal out of Merrill. Fenris frowned like he would have objected but Merrill gave him her weightiest admonishing look and shook her head.

_:Really, he's so stingy, I swear!:_ Merrill thought to herself as they at last crossed the threshold of the house and walked back to the kitchen. _:I can understand being worried about thieves or slavers, but taking food out of a growing boy's mouth is a bit much.:_

She did know however, that Fenris would prefer that no-one know the layout of his abode, but with Lucien on guard now no-one was getting past the threshold without her permission, not without paying very dearly for it anyway. So far as Merrill was concerned it was more than safe enough to have a guest or two over, particularly since she knew that Fenris would probably pull the boy aside later and threaten him into keeping his mouth shut about what he saw in the house.

_:Which, looking around at this place still all but empty, really isn't much. I think since there's actually almost no furniture and tapestries in this place that it might actually be worth less than before I'd started cleaning it.:_

No-one knew about the treasure underneath except for herself, Fenris and Aveline and Donnic and none of them were ever going to mention it. All the other safes to keep coin on hand were all very cleverly hidden.

"Here, Perram, you can help me put away the supplies," Merrill said. "I was just about to make lunch. I know you just ate, but I've never known a boy your age who couldn't do justice to a meal."

"Uh, sure..." Perram said, looking over at the collection of bottles and herbs she'd left on the counter where she'd been sorting through them earlier.

"Are you a witch?" he asked. "Like, do you turn people into toads and make love potions? I heard that's what they do."

"Griffon fluff!" Merrill dismissed with a slightly insulted sniff. "Transformation magic is a difficult specialty to master, though I have heard that it's the specialty of a number of Keepers, most infamously Keeper Zatharian, whom the Kin had all thought figured out how to restore elven immortality... but that's another story. I'm afraid that turning people into toads is not a specialty of mine. As for love potions... _no_. My Keeper warned me away from that, it's a _bad_ bit of business all around. Even the suppoedly "harmless" love potions that only cause an intense infatuation and that passes quickly are still risky for the side-effects can linger. The worst of them cause a dangerous obsession and dependence that slowly destroys its victim's sense of self, it's every bit as bad as the most manipulative blood magic. Anyone would be well advised to leave love potions well alone."

"So you do know the recipes? I mean, it's possible?" the boy asked.

"I'm _aware_ of how such things are made," Merrill said evenly, but with an edge to her tone. "But mostly only so that I can dispel the effects and treat the illness they cause."

"Oh..." Perram said, sounding disappointed.

Merrill looked at Fenris in puzzlement, trying to figure out why he seemed so interested. Fenris rolled his eyes and shook his head, seeming both amused and exasperated about something. Then it did slowly dawn on her...

"Perram? Are you sweet on someone?" Merrill asked curiously.

The boy jerked back like he'd been stung and his face flushed red.

"N-No!" he denied vehemently. "Of course not, why would I? I mean, y'know?"

Merrill could have swore she heard a snicker come from the hearth.

"Oh..." feeling obscurely disappointed.

The two of them finished setting the stores away in their pantries and cupboards, then Merrill set about making dough for bread, while she directed Perram to start cutting up ingredients for soup. The soup would cook for supper. She'd brought home a good sized fish, and she knew that Fenris didn't like fish, so she had every intention of sharing it with the boy.

"I do hope you like yours fried," Merrill said grabbing the hard, stale end of the loaf that she'd kept out just for that purpose, toasting it and the directing Perram to crumble it up to make bread crumbs for frying.

"How's the Alienage doing?" Merrill asked curiously as she decapitated, de-scaled and de-boned the fish, then cut it to bits be egged, floured and rolled in the mixture of bread crumbs and spices.

"It's worse," the boy replied. "There have been more collapses and there's even less safe places to hole away in than before. There's only one or two of the old houses left in the hex, and they're crammed full. The boats are all burned up except for Old Dalan's leaky sieve, so foods in even _shorter_ supply. The Chantry's still turning us away when we go there to ask for aid. We've still got injured, though those medicines you made up for us are going a long way to saving what's left to be saved so... yknow, thanks fer that."

"I'm happy to help, and I want to do more," Merrill replied. "Once I get the garden up and running here I'll have a way to affordably make more potions. I tested out the kitchen last night, and it seems like it'll do well for the crafting of them."

"Y'mean it?" Perram asked hopefully.

"Of course I do!" Merrill said.

Being there and helping them when they needed her most, she hoped, would go a long way toward building bridges with the elves of the Alieange and with overcoming her own social awkwardness.

"Any word on when they might want me to come back?" she asked hopefully. "I could be a help."

Perram looked uncomfortable.

"Sorry," he said. "I know you're a good sort, but a lot of those guys only see the magic and the lightning, and the look on that Templar's face when you burned him to a crisp and moved on to the next like it were nothing."

"They were going to kidnap that poor girl and kill her out of hand, and she's not even got any magical talent," Merrill defended. "I was just doing what I had to do in order to keep them all safe."

"I know that, but even if you _meant_ well, now everyone thinks were all harboring mages in the Alienage, or what's left of it. They've been treating us rougher because of it and the Chantry has added it to thier list of reasons why we don't need any aid from them. On top of everything else, there's been talk among the Shem about a Purge."

"A Purge?!" Merrill asked, alarmed and concerned. "Whatever for?"

"When the Shem suffer, we elves are the first to feel the brunt of their anger," Perram replied with a dejected shrug. "They got their homes destroyed in the fires too, and they can't feel bad without making someone else feel worse. There's been a rumor going around that we're hoarding food from them, though _where_ we would get it from when our fishing boats are destroyed, and the Chantry sure ain't giving us any hand-outs, is a mystery to me."

Merrill felt the familiar feeling of guilt and helplessness run through her. She'd wasted so much time and effort here helping Fenris and cleaning his house when her own people were suffering greater hurts and discomforts. At the same time, it felt like there was just nothing she could _do_ there in the Alienage. The need was so great and it felt like her skills and resources were so small, not nearly enough for what the elves of the Alienage were going to need, and she just couldn't think of what she could do to make things better for them.

_:After all, it's not like I can just magic up a shelter for th...:_

Merrill blinked, an absurd, and strange and wonderful sort of notion occurring to her. She'd made a roof with ironbark vines supporting panes of steel-glass, and she'd made a floor that could hold weight probably even better than a wood or even a stone one could. Wouldn't it be logical to take it one step further and say that she could make a house, or several of them?

_:No that's just silly...:_ she tried to tell herself. _:It would take... well, I don't exactly know **what** it would take but surely more than I could supply. Surely...:_

The idea wouldn't leave her, however and Merrill decided she would tuck it away to investigate later, once she could consult with Lucien, or any of the Spirits he could contact.

Perram was appreciative of her hospitality and noticeably reluctant to leave once lunch was done, so, feeling bad for sending him away, Merrill promised him that she would meet him in the market in a few days, hopefully with some medicines for him to take back to the Alienage to help the elves there. She rather hoped it might sweeten their temper with her for it seemed they were all still cross with her about bringing shemlen attention on their heads. The Chantry seemed disinclined to do the job that it was actually _supposed_ to have been founded for, which was to succor those in need regardless of their race, so Merrill would take up the slack in any way she could and be glad of it.

Once lunch was done, Merrill turned her attention back to the last pile of books in the atrium. Poncy had removed all of the other piles of cleaned and sorted books to the library and re-shelved them while Merrill had been out shopping, so all that was left was for her to sort through the last mound of books. She worked steadily, dusting and sorting for the next several hours, and Poncy steadily carted them all away back to the library for reshelving in their designated areas. It was nearing sunset when she'd finished, Merrill retired to the kitchen to see about the stew she'd set to simmer earlier that day.

"Fenris! Dinner!" she called up the staircase the led to the second story of the house where he kept his newly cleaned suite.

"It is good to see that you are at least prompt in clearing away your intrusion into the area where I take my exersize," he said as he descended his staircase.

"You could always go exercise outside if you wished," Merrill pointed out as they took up their places at the table-counter in the kitchen and Pontius served them from the stewpot. "The sunlight might do you some good."

His only reply was a snort as he tucked into his meal, which was a relatively simple one of stew and rolls.

Merrill tried not to feel guilty for enjoying such bounty when, for all she knew, the elves of the Alienage were making do with little or even nothing that night. If he noticed her melancholy mood, Fenris did not comment on it, and dinner was a silent affair. Even Lucien seemed to have other things he was working on right then and Poncy had undertaken the project of digging up the back garden after he'd finished shelving the last of the books.

"Fenris," Merrill said as she took her bowl and cup to the sink. "What would you do if you had the means to help a people, but they didn't like you and didn't want your help?"

"I would not help them," he replied simply.

"But what if they really _needed_ your help and they were too proud and stubborn to ask or even to accept it when you offered it?"

"Then I still would not help them," he replied.

"But what if--" she began.

"Witch, by this tiresome line of questioning I can only assume that you mean to meddle in some matter that isn't any of your concern without regard to the people you are meddling with, and I might like to take this opportunity to point out, though I know you probably will not listen or care, that the last time you attempted such, it turned out very badly for everyone involved."

"It won't happen that way this time," Merrill defended.

Fenris heaved a frustrated sigh and glared at her. Merrill hesitated.

"I mean, I'll try very hard to make sure it doesn't. I..." she teared up a little. "I can't just do _nothing_ Fenris. They're hungry and I can feed them. They need shelter and I can shelter them, I just know it. I only need to work out how to do it. Is it so wrong that I want to make their lives a little better? They have needs that go unfulfilled by the people that are supposed to fill them, and everyone just sits back and laughs about it but I can't stand by idly and let them suffer."

Fenris was quiet for a moment then said

"It's not wrong to wish to aid those who need it..." he hesitated. "But I can't see any way you could possibly help them. Especially when they seem pretty set against taking your help."

"I want to get it _right_ this time," she said sadly. "I've messed up even when all I wanted was to make things better, but even when I've failed a lot I can't just do nothing."

"Meddlesome witch," he said without heat and took himself off to his room.

Merrill went to bed feeling restless. She tossed and turned, unable to sleep, her mind buzzing with and endless stream of disjointed thoughts and half-formed notions clashing with all of the various disparate bits and pieces of things she'd learned over the years. She had the feeling, the odd and inescapable feeling, that she had a lot of very important pieces in her hands and that they all would fit together somehow, if only she could figure out how. It was the same sort of frustrating feeling she'd gotten when she'd looked at her eluvian, knew that the pieces could fit together, were _supposed_ to fit together, and yet the solution had continued to elude her. Her frustration followed her into her sleep and she wound up sleeping fitfully.

She woke the next morning feeling little rested and unusually grumpy. Added to that the sky was unusually overcast for Kirkwall, which was usually sunny, and threatening to storm later on, which only soured her mood further. Breakfast was a halfhearted affair of porridge, which turned out somewhat mushy and almost burnt and some toast. Fenris looked at first inclined to complain about the relative slim pickings on offer that morning as compared to mornings past, but must have gotten a good look at her mood and huffed a bit, ate his food and took himself off, muttering audibly about moody mages and women's moon-times. Merrill scowled at his retreating backside but took herself off to her new library in the hopes that the books, her old friends and constant companions, would soothe her uneven temper.

"Oh,"Merrill said hapily, upon discovering that the last bit of restoring the library had been finished for during the night while she slept. "It loks worlds better in here!"

 Merrill _did_ find herself soothed a bit by the smell of old paper, ink, polished wood oil and leather emanating from the shelves. She paused and made herself appreciate the work she and Poncy had done there. The shelves were only a quarter of the way filled (some shelves were completely empty in fact) but they were all clean and organized, the wood gleamed with polish in the morning light and all of the books were dusted and organized properly. The presence of so many books, which had always been her closest friends throughout her life (though of course the library was quite different from the collection of scrolls in Marethari's aravell that Merrill had grown up with thinking of as a "library") did make Merrill feel better.

"He even lined up all of my personal journals back here near the desk where I can work on them!" Merrill exclaimed in delight upon seeing that her collection of battered notebooks that she'd rescued from collapse and fire in the Alienage had been neatly stacked away on a a shelf near the desk.

Not all of the notes that she'd made over the years about her planned project for a new sort of magical plant, a spell-plant, had been burned when she'd lost her home, she still retained most of the knowledge she'd worked out about her experiment. She was second-guessing herself about the internal spell-workings and, now that she had a truly helpful Spirit to offer assistance, Merrill was more inclined to do a little more research into the matter first.

_:I think I'll run my plans by Lucien and the other Spirits first, and get a second opinion before I do the actual working,:_ she considered to herself.

Merrill had continued her studies as a potential Keeper over the years, using her specialization as a Bloodmage in ways her own Keeper had probably not anticipated. The blood-codex, that twisted-ladder-looking thing, was part of a system that decided how an organism was formed. It did so by creating the shape, and thus the functions, of the proteins in the body. The blood-codex could split itself down the middle, and the half a strand would be read and understood by a special codex-reader, and the proteins would be formed for the function they were needed for. After that, the proteins then took the instructions that the blood codex had formed them for and went out and committed the task for which they had been created.

_:I do wonder though...:_ Merrill mused to herself, looking over the work she had done for her seedling experiment, that changed the codex that showed how a plant would form itself and then looking over her notes about the interior workings of the eluvian.

_:It's not... entirely all **that** dissimilar,:_ She thought. _:The spellwebs of the eluvian are complex as spiderwebs, but if one breaks it down to the very most basic part it is fairly simple in its own way. Just the same way that blood-codex and protiens aren't so terribly complicated when you break them down into thier componenets either.:_

The spellwebs of the eluvian seemed to deal with the material world on the level of it's material core-structure, which could be manipulated via it's magical energy which formed the basis of the bonds in each core's bond-structure. It had a symbolic code that could account in _finicking_ detail for nearly everything in a particular thing. They had functions which dealt with "size" of the object, which the ancients referred to as the amount of its own substance that a particular piece of material was made up of... and they very much differentiated that from how much something weighed. They had spell-web functions for temperature and energy.

_:They must have known everything about everything down to the smallest detail in Arlathan,:_ Merrill thought wistfully.

In fact, Merrill had come to realize that the basics of the ancient magics of arlathan consisted of breaking things down into their tiniest details and then manipulating that "information." The ancient magics of arlathan used spellwebs to manipulate this information down on the level of energy, and instead of moving great magics about, they used systems to maneuver magic in very precise ways that achieved the desired result.

The spellwebs of the eluvian were all done rather like a true web in that there were "anchors" which set the spellwebs primary parameters and gave the basic outline of what the spell was or did, and there was a nexus in the center which tended to act rather like a central brain for the spell and it was where the variable parts of the commands of the spell were sorted and enacted. Spiraling out from the nexus were the strands strung with "nodes" which were many tiny varying commands and tasks that helped the spellweb function. The nexus made "decisions" depending on when and how each of its anchors were activated and in what order, bu those decisions were based on a yes-no dichotomy, Lucien explained to her, and several decisions that the nexus made tended to be default, "if not yes, then this" or "if not no then this." Even a simple spellweb was potentially fraught with troubles and glitches of the mage spinning the web was not careful and very exact in when he or she wanted. Merrill knew all about careful and exact, she had cleansed the eluvian of Taint, after all.

_:I think, however, that the reason my eluvian was never able to work for me even after I'd finished putting it all back together and aligning the spellwebs was that it seems that magic was once a great deal more **fluid** than it is today. I was able to re-write the spellwebs exactly, but they did not interact with the world in the same way now as they would have then. I think. The only thing I could do now, I suppose, is to re-think the system they use and come up with some way to work around modern limitations. If only we had a way to augment the lack of magical power, something like lyrium, only not as rare and expensive. If we had a sort of magical fuel to kickstart a spellweb and offset its magical cost, then I could recreate the ancient spellwebs in modern times and make them work!:_

During few months prior to poor Anders loosing himself to his own hatred, Merrill had made a rather intense study of the basic "spellweb"... around everything else that had been going on. The aruin-holm had not given her any of the answers she'd sought, but it had led her toward asking possibly the right questions. She had isolated the simplest spellweb she could find and picked it apart studying what little she could determine about its nodes and how they might possibly have worked. Putting the idea that the elves of Arlathan had manipulated the "information" about the world with their magic, and the structure of the spellweb, which had puzzled her deeply in that, each spellwebs seemed very delicate and had not be able to hold very much in the way of raw magical power at all, Merrill had come to a shocking and very disappointing revelation over time.

_:The wondrous and mysterious magics of the Elves of Arlathan, Hallowed Be Their Names... it's all just **math**!:_ she thought in exasperation. _:The spellweb, it's just a long, drawn-out mathematical equation for describing the information of a particular something, and then manipulating that information.:_

That revelation had been horribly disappointing. Keeper Marethari had made her learn her sums and equations as First because it was part of the lore, and Merrill had always had a talent for it, but it certainly tarnished her mental image of the supposedly once proud and might mages of Arlathan. Instead of being great and mysterious mages of old, in her mind they now all rather resembled a lot of robe-wearing magical clerks, plugging away at their formulae.

_:But at least if it's small and reasonably understandable, there's no reason why I can't adapt it and adopt it in the work I do already. And who knows, perhaps my work will give a some new breakthrough! If I could create a self-replicating spell that's symbiotic with a plant's natural processes, there's no reason why I couldn't find a way to tie magic into a natural process too, and perhaps harvest it somehow and use it instead of having to rely on bloodmagic.:_

She now knew, thanks to her work on the intricate spellwebs of the eluvian, that the blood-codex of a plant could be further modified from what even the Dalish Keepers had thought possible. Off and on over the years, as she developed her researches, Merrill had also continuously revised and developed a specific spell-web based on the intricate spellwebs she had studied in the eluvian that she had adapted to seed-crafts her experimental spell-tree. She'd had a few small successful test runs with adapting the basic premise with other plants to enhance certain capabilities; her spices were resistant to pests, a crop of elfroot she'd seed-modified and grown had produced twice the amount of healing power as a regular form of wild elfroot. Her ironbark-vines were her latest development. Merrill felt that she had the theory and the method down, she'd studied the works of other Keepers... now she was ready to test out something that she hoped was going to revolutionize the way her people could possibly perform magic.

_:The individual proteins and cells in an organism are self-replicating,:_ Merrillthought with excitement. _:And the spell-webs of arlathan are able to perform the same function over and over. Why not a spell that can self-replicate and grow along with the organism that it is bound with? Why not  living spell? Why not a way to pull in and process magic without having to pull it constantly across the Veil?:_

Merrill heard with half an ear as Pontius went about cleaning up and clearing out the backyard garden courtyard while she spent the morning quietly and painstakingly sketching out the long complex blood-codex of her chosen plant amalgamation in her notebook and then working out how the functions of the spellweb might be made to work with the same basic layout as the plant-codex. The plants that she'd selected for her work had long been known and used for their magical effects, producing effects naturally that had been refined and used to produce tonics and potions of miraculous effect over the years. Nature had made a good start, but Merrill was still just audcious enough to decide that Nature had not quite gone far enough.

_:And the more I've studied them over the years the more certain I've become that these magic plants have all been tampered with in some way in the distant past,:_ Merrill thought.

She rather suspected that it was her ancestors who were responsible. The Ancient elves of Arlathan had probably achieved many wonderful things, why not this?

Once lunch rolled around, Merrill took a break from her studies to eat and then, instead of going back to the library she remained in the kitchen and began brewing up batches of healing potions.

"Lucien?" Merrill called over the the hearth spirit. "I was wondering if you or any of your Spirit friends might know anything about how to write the ancient spellwebs from Arlathan? I have a project I'm working on, and I could use some clarification of a few points."

"I'm sure I could find some," Lucien said. "There's a lot of old ones that still hang around that old broke-down library from way back when."

"Library?" Merrill asked, immediately interested. "What library? Is it an elven library? Can I go see it?"

Her heart fluttered with longing at the thought.

"You can't reach it," he said flatly. "It's old and broken anyway. The only Old Ones left still hanging around it are all sad and broken too."

"Just like the Shem to destroy anythng they can't understand," Merrill thought, burning with anger at the thought of those people destroying all of that ancient knowledge from her ancestors.

It was bad enough they enslaved her people and then  later on broke their word to take away the only homeland that modern elves had ever known, did they have to destroy _all_ traces of the fact that her people had once been proud and great?

"I don't suppose you could go out and seek wisdom from some of those Old Ones? I have this new thing I'm doing. It based on the spellwebs that I found in the eluvian, but I want to make sure I'm not getting something terribly wrong first. I only have guess work to go off from you know."

Merrill described the project she was working on, and what research she'd done, as well as her wish to experiment integrating a spellweb into a living plant as part of its natural process, though she suspected that this would make it delicate. She was looking for any advice that the Spirits might have to offer on the subject.

"Sure, I can ask around, if ya want," Lucien agreed. "Will it be worth bacon?"

"I'll have it waiting by the hearth for you when you come back," Merrill promised.

The hearth dimmed down, signifying that Lucien had went out to search the Fade fro some of his Spirit contacts and Merrill went about brewing potions for the elves at the Alienage as well as frying him up a few pieces of bacon to keep her promise. And hour or so later, after the first batch of potions had cooled enough to pour into the sanitized, empty wine bottles, the hearth blazed back to life and Lucien announced his presence by cheerfully saying

"You certainly set the cat among the pigeons with that one missus!"

"Oh dear, I hope I didn't upset them," Merrill said worriedly.

"Nah, they're just excited that's all," he said chowing down on his bacon prize. "It's not often that people come to them seeking wisdom, especially not by asking another spirit."

"They don't think that I bound you to it, do they?" Merrill asked, a bit concerned about her reputation among the Spirits on that side of the Fade.

She didn't want them thinking that she went about capturing and enslaving Spirits to do her bidding.

"I explained the situation to them," Lucien soothed her. "They were happy to share their knowledge with me ta bring back to you to help you out. Sadly fer you, missus, since yer physical, I can't just transfer the knowledge into you directly the way we do with each other."

"It's a good thing you lot don't have physical bodies, or I'm sure you'd have an awful headache from it all," Merrill said in dismay.

"There is a way around that though," Lucien said. "Yer a mage, so you can move yer spirit into the Fade, right?"

"It takes a lot of effort and meditation," Merrill said cautiously. "But yes, I can manage it if I work at it."

"Well there you go," Lucien said brightly. "The wards have kinda made me a nice cozy nest on the other side of the Veil where most of me that isn't manifested here in the physical world can rest. That's actually where I interact with the wards from mostly. You do what you do ta get yer body and mind separated, come visit me tonight and I can give you the information the same way we Spirits do. If yer not physical, then ya won't be limited by yer flesh so it should work just fine."

Merrill felt a tremor of unease and misgiving. Her Keeper had warned her that her nature was too open and compassionate and that she was too trusting, but the lure of additional knowledge was too strong a call for her to resist.

_:And it's Lucien after all,:_ she reasoned with herself. _:He's a helpful Spirit, surely he wouldn't hurt me.:_

"Are you sure it's safe?" she asked nervously. "What if I loose my way?"

"You'll be in the house wards an' safe with me, missus," Lucien said. "I wouldn't let anything happen to ya."

"Alright," she agreed, curiosity pulling at her strongly with the promise of possibly learning something new. "I'll cross over into the Fade tonight, just... only for a few hours."

 


	14. Chapter 14

When Fenris came into the kitchen for dinner to discover that the stove and much of the available counter-space was taken up with herbal preparations and saw Merrill chatting happily away with the Spirit of the hearth, surrounded by books and sketch-journals, he rolled his eyes, took up his plate of food and beat a hasty retreat to his own room to eat in blessed solitude.

"Missus," Lucien said as she finished off bottling the last of the potions she had prepared for the day when the elves of the alienage would hopefully let her back through the gate to help them out.

"Yes, Lucien?" Merrill asked.

"You said you wanted to learn more about how the ancient elves cast the magical technology they relied on, right?" he said.

"I did," she said.

"Then would it be alright with you if I invited another Spirit who knows a whole lot more about it than me across the inner wards to come and teach you?"

Merrill hesitated a bit and Lucien went on to explain.

"I got the basics of what you wanted to know transferred into me, but there's only so much extreneous information I can hold before I begin to drift away from my focus. Wisdom's focus is... well, wisdom. She's proabably forgotten more about ancient magic than all of the Dalish combined ever knew."

"That wouldn't be so difficult," Merrill admitted. "We've lost so much."

She mentally weighed the decision. Dealing with Spirits always had it's inherent dangers, like people they could at times be unpredictable but mostly only because they did not seem to understand the world in the same way that she did. But a Spirit of Wisdom sounded much less potentially hazardous than a Spirit of Audacity.

 _:And in for a copper bit, in for a sovereign, as Varric says,:_ she thought with a shrug. _:I've solved this much on my own, and if I'm going to proceed then I want to be able to have every advantage I can muster to me. I might as well give it a chance.:_

"Alright Lucien," Merrill said. "Invite your Spirit friend over, but she can only be allowed into the innerscape wards. She's not to manifest herself on this side of the Veil."

"Sure, I'll let her know to come tonight."

Despite the risks inherent with dealing with Spirits, Merrill was very much looking forward to her lessons that night. She felt she had deduced a very great deal of information in her many years of dedicated research and she was looking forward to having her hard work confirmed. In addition, she was hopeful that she might get a second opinion on what was keeping her a bit stymied with her energy-gathering and storing tree. When it was tme for her to close her eyes and enter into meditation, Merrill had a hard time reigning in her excitement and settling herself down enough to achieve the relaxed state that would allow her to separate her soul from her body and enter the Fade more fully than mere dreaming. Lucien had taught her a trick to traveling the Fade while asleep that would let her enter the innerscape of his wards where she, as mistress of the manse, could invite other Spirits in past the "gate."

Lucien's innerscape looked exactly like Fenris' mansion, only it wasn't made of stone and wood and glass, but rather it seemed sort of like a reflection made of light and magic, everything was vaguely translucent and the rooms were all characterized not by solid walls but by ward-webs written in complex patterns of light. It was fascinating to look at and Merrill studied them eagerly, storing the information away for later contemplation or use.

"Glad ta see ya missus!" A familiar voice said off to one side.

Merrill looked over to see, not the tiny, flaming hearth-spirit she was accustomed to, but an oddly-shaped being made of Spirit essence. The Lucien in the Fade had twenty arms and seven eyes in various places all around his body. He didn't even have feet he just sort of moved around. Each of his twenty arms had hands with palms that had complex knotworks of wards glowing on the palms of them and his fingers glowed different colors. Merrill supposed she now knew just exactly how Lucien managed all of the wards.

"I asked a few of the Old Ones if they'd show up to teach a new student the basics, sadly most of 'em are all too far sunk in their own sorrows to notice or care, but one of them said she'd be here. Wisdom is waiting outside for you to lift the ward and let her in... here, follow me."

Lucien led her through the rooms of the house to the front entryway, which, instead of being the open, airy, colorful entrance that Merrill had restored looked more like a castle with a drawbridge and portcullis. When Merrill peeked outside of the strong doors and gateways sealed firmly shut with magic she looked out onto an empty, glowing landscape with jagged bits of rock and scenery that made no sense popping up here and there. Smack in the center of the strange scenery there was an enormous hole that swirled with a dark anti-energy, a swirling not-matter that seemed to suck in even the light. It looked desolate, slightly malevolent, and... somehow hungry.

"Lucien?" Merrill asked looking around at the strong ward-walls and solid magic humming through the fade-mansion. "Why is your innerscape so different from the rest of the world here in the Fade?"

"Don't go out _there_ missus," the Spirit warned. "It's dangerous. This place and that place is fed with _old_ magic from ancient days. The humans came along and corrupted what was already sleeping there with their dark magic and blood sacrifices hundreds of years ago, but... I managed to keep out of that pit they made. It was hard to coax Wisdom to come this close to _that_ _place_ , but knowledge is important to her kind and to me, and knowledge is worthless if it is not shared and allowed to grow. If you don't let it build on itself by passing it on and letting others continue to add to it, then all you get is a broken old library hoarding away information and being perfectly useless to everyone."

Lucien had Merrill place her hand on the panel to the metaphysical portcullis and unlock the wards along with him, allowing the spirit waiting outside the gate into what Merrill was coming to understand might just be the Fade-reflection of the House Wards as Lucien saw and understood them.

"Greetings Wisdom," the multi-armed spirit-Lucien said with a small formal (and curiously elven-like) bow.

Merrill was a bit disappointed by the fact that the spirit of wisdom that Lucien had found for her looked... prosaic. The Spirit of Wisdom that walked confidently through the front gate into the ward-house looked vaguely elven and ever so slightly like Merrill's own Keeper, Marethari. She possessed a refined, slightly other-worldly cast to her features, as though she had seen what a physical form looked like and had moulded herself to resemble it, but without the various imperfections that gave a living person thier character, more like a finely sculpted statue than a person. Still, the great tome she cradled in her arms glowed promisingly, and Merrill was eagre to get started.

"You have come to be called and to call yourself Lucien," the Spirit said, her voice sounding vaguely resonant. "I greet you as well and thank you for the opportunity to enter and seek shelter within your nest. It is certainly very..."

The spirit looked around her with interest, glowing eyes taking in the details of the wards and the structure that mirrored the physical world on the other side of the Fade.

"It does remind me a bit of old days, but the architecture is limited," Wisdom said with a slightly haughty tone. "Still, one works with what one has in the limited means available to them. Better here than _out there_. If you have not been told, young one, you must be warned now. Guard your nest for a storm the likes of which our kind has not seen since aeons past is brewing. Already the clouds gather on the horizon."

"Whacha mean?" Lucien asked. "I didn't bring ya in here for doomsayin' I brought ya ta teach my missus about those ancient spells she's setting about learning."

"The Old Wolf walks and wakes, we fear is has done something foolish. Again."

Merrill felt a thrill of alarm rush through her.

"Wolf? The Dread Wolf?" she gasped, eyes widening in fear.

Suddenly all the tales that Hahren Paivel and Marethari had told of the Dread Wolf and his notorious treachery, and the dozens of other made-up stories that the children had told each other to titillate and frighten one another, seemed less like smoke and wind. If a Spirit was saying that the Dread Wolf was awake and walking around then perhaps it was true.

"Fear not child," the spirit turned to her and said. "He fancies Himself to have _grander_ purposes than one little woodling hiding in among the stone and metal."

Suddenly the spirit turned and brought her full attention to bear on Merrill, eyes seeming to grow wide and fill with a rainbow brilliance of flaming light, like the sky lit by the ice-fire on a cold winter night. Merrill felt herself being examined on the _inside_ , every part of her soul picked over and rummaged through, but it felt strangely non-invasive as the consciousness doing the examination was so far outside of what she considered normal that standards such as privacy didn't and couldn't apply.

"Interesting," the Spirit pronounced at last. "You are a _curious_ one. Curiosity leads to exploration, and exploration adds to the pool of knowledge. A bit of sad business with Audacity, but _it's_ already gathering once again, perhaps it will have better luck in what it focuses around this time. It's been a while since we've met someone so willing to listen, and yet... so _not_. Interesting."

Merrill could feel nothing but confusion and a vague sense of relief about the Spirits decree.

"She likes ya, missus," Lucien translated.

"Oh," Merrill said faintly. "That's good. Will we learn about magic then?"

"We shall do," the Spirit said decisively. "Lucien, your Chamber of Learning, if you would be so kind."

"Ah Wizzy, ya know I don't have so fancy a thing as that," Lucien said.

If a Spirit could radiate disapproval, the wisdom spirit that Merrill had invited to the Fade ward-house certainly did. Merrill was getting a distinct sense of haughtier from the Spirit, the same sense of competitive pride that scholars often got when they gathered to compare knowledge but then it devolved into who had the best and most knowledge and why theirs was better than everyone else's.

Lucien led them both back to the library, or rather, where the Library was located in the physical house on the _other_ side of the Fade. The ward-shaped house on this side of the Fade had a few noticeable differences... one of them being that rooms were not always confined to physical limitations. Once Merrill crossed the threshold of the "library" she discovered that it was twice the size of the original and that the shelves were packed with seemed to be more like _representations_ of books rather than physical books. Curious, she picked one up from the table nearest her hand and opened it, only to be overwhemed with the sensation of laughter. Flashing through her mind were many various scenes in which one or another occupant of the house had laughed about something. There were private moments of shared jokes, polite laughs at bad puns, public festivities of drunken amusement and many others all flowing into her mind in such a way that she felt as though she was both watching it and experiencing it. She closed the book a moment later to discover that she herself was caught mid-giggle.

She looked into another book and found herself transported to a quasi-memory of the kitchen and the sight of Fenris sniffing the air and Merrill just finishing up putting breakfast on the table.

"What are all of these?" Merrill asked. "Are these your memories?"

"Sort of," Lucien said. "When I'm not monitoring the house, I like to try to understand the people. Why do you all pull air through your noses when there's food nearby? What's with that weird reaction you had to opening the cupboard full of rotted things. And as for laughter... I've got a whole section on it!"

Lucien gestured to the appropriate section of books.

"I just don't get it, and from all I can tell, you weird meat-people don't really understand it either, you just... do it. It's so strange."

Merrill suddenly found herself feeling more akin to the spirit, because she had once wondered about why people laughed too, and more importantly, why were they laughing at _her_. She didn't always understand people either, and it was nice to be among those who understood them even _less_ than she did.

"I did not travel here to discuss your own on-going project, Illumination, I have come to share wisdom with the curious mind you spoke of," the Spirit of Wisdom said in a tone of haughty directness. "Now child, open your mind."

"Whoa! _Hey_! None of _that_!" Lucien protested immediately, stepping between Merrill and Wisdom with his twenty arms outstretched as though sheilding Merrill from a potential danger. "You'll burn her mind out if you try to share it that way! She's still a fleshie, ya gotta be slower and more patient than that."

"Hm. I see," Wisdom said, but Merrill got the sense that it didn't _really_ understand. "How should we proceed then if I am not to transfer the knowledge directly to her as we do?"

"Just start by um... well showing her things," Lucien said. "Like pictures and then you explain those pictures and tell her about them. When she understands them then you can maybe show her a memory about them but only a little one, you don't want to hurt her mind. Fleshies are limited in what they can absorb all at once, and pushing too much into them can damage them."

"How very... quaint," Wisdom said.

Merrill got the odd feeling that she was only able to hear half of the conversation, that the words they spoke were just _one_ part of what they communicated to each other, and that the _real_ speech was going on in some way that she could not sense.

"Very well," Wisdom said with a slight edge of put-upon impatience in her tone.

He opened the great tome she'd brought cradled in her arms and to Merrill's amazement it folded out until it was nearly flat and the surfaces inside were like two eluvians that connected together to form a slightly larger mirror. The surface of the mirror glowed softly and then, out of the glowing surface flowed page after page of knowledge, only instead of looking like regular paper, the pages hovering in the air were semi-translucent made of softly glowing light with bright lettering on them. The pages arranged themselves in clusters and then three dimensional images, looking just like real objects came pouring out after them.

Merrill saw what she recognized to be a modern spell-sigil, only the normal lines of the glyph that activated when triggered were underwritten in different colored lines of light underneath a simple web of fairly intricate weaving. Then the glyphs and sigils grew more complicated until they began to warp and mutate and then, in a sudden strange leap, Merrill saw what she recognized as a spellweb of the sort she often found in the eluvian. She was seeing, backwards, the process that had taken place when ancient elven spellwebs had devolved into modern-day glyphs!

"I... um, I thought we would talk about the elven magic?" Merrill asked hesitantly.

"We are," Wisdom replied. "Your understanding of the basics is fairly advanced for the current era, however, it is incomplete and lacks a proper grounding in the hteory behind it. However, your mind is a curious one, and I have confidence that, when you have been given the necessary education, you will succeed in your endeavors to breakthrough the current day limitations on magic, and resurrect a new understanding of the ancient art that is applicable to modern life. And thus, you will have brought into the world a new foundation to be built upon and added to."

What followed was a whirlwind lesson that pushed Merrill to the very _limits_ of her understanding. Wisdom quickly rushed through lessons about the core-structure being the foundation of physical reality on her side of the Fade, then moved quickly on to lessons about the magical energy that held the core-structures together and a mage's ability breakdown magic into was it was and what it wasn't. As soon as Merrill grasped both of those founding principles Wisdom, pushed what felt like an entire library of magical formulae and thier uses into her head with barely a by your leave, then rushed on to lessons that would enable Merrill to understand that understanding in entirely new ways. If she'd thought that being Marethari's First had been a difficult study time, it was _nothing_ when compared to an ancient Spirit of Wisdom who was determined to rush her pitiful new student through the "boring bits" and on into the truly _useful_ knowledge.

 _:I'm going to have a pounding headache when all of this is over with,:_ she thought faintly at the rare instance when Wisdom was not shoving information at her at breakneck speeds.

Time lost all meaning as Merrill was pushed from one concept to the next to the next, unraveling them just far enough to gain a grasp of the underlying principles before Wisdom decided she'd figured out just enough to shove the textbooks of applications into her mind. Wisdom reluctantly understood that ture spellwebs and practiced by her immortal ancestors could not be created but she hoped that, with enough baseline knowledge of the works of the older elves, this bright young new spark before her would be capable of... _creation_.

"So that's why...?" Merrill asked after, head spinning, she'd begged for a breif pause in the marathon leaning-session. "That's why Spirits are truly attracted to people like me? Like mages?"

"Like all people really," Lucien said. "Spirits exists and we accrete and we study, but we don't _create_. Even if we understand what it _is_ , we can't make music, or write stories or build palaces or make new spells. We're pure magic, its true, and to an extent we're immortal, we can go on gathering wisdom and experiences and memories forever, but we can't _do_ anything with them, and we can't make any new ones. Wisdom's sad that so much was lost and she saw that same sadness in you. But as much as she mourns what is lost, she mourns even more the opportunity to watch it grow and change and become _new_ things. She hopes you have the potential for that."

"Oh..." Merrill said feeling deeply touched, and deeply honored. "Actually... I did have a question..."

Merrill discovered that she could put her own thoughts and the vague ideas she'd worked out and sort of push them onto the table, drawing out her sketches and concepts into pictures that looked like a three dimensional object hovering over the table.

She showed Wisdom the idea she'd had for a plant that, instead of using sunlight for creating sap, would have a spellweb encoded into its blood-codex that would enable it to pull magical energy and store it away in is sap instead of sugars. Wisdom looked intrigued, but quickly pointed out that it would almost certainly burn the plant out, and then pointed out the holes in Merrill's experimental self-replicating spell-seed spellweb itself, mistakes which would dom the experiment to failure born from her imperfect understanding of the structure of spellwebs.

"Well,now I have the proper grounding," Merrill said. "And you wanted me to try something new, so let's try it!"

Nothing if not stubborn, Merrill reached into her diagrams, made some changes to the function nodes and command anchors in the spellweb of the spell-seed. and then altered some of the rungs in the blood codex further and showed her new teacher her changes. Wisdom looked intrigued and announced that the concept was stable, though the notion of binding the energy into the sap of the plant was not and the result would explode. Merrill, not one to be deterred by anyone, even a Spirit-person, telling her that her hard work was doomed to failure, gritted her teeth and rethoguht the structure of the energy-storage mechanism.

"If sap is too unstable, why not mimic the way that trees store sugars, which is energy, in fruit?" she said next after some thought. "Instead of a seed that replicates a plant in the middle, though, we could make a spell-seed that's function is to continuously stabilize the harvested energy that forms around its core. That should work..."

She redesigned the spell-webs and the blood-codex of her spell-seed and had her teacher look at the result. Wisdom then quickly pointed out that,though the new redesign addressed the issue of the stable storage of energy, the plant would still most likely blow itself out over time without proper grounding and wards built into it.

"Then we could set it in the center of a grounding array, just like that one you showed me before--"

"But that relies upon the easier flow of energy that no longer exists in this world," Wisdom pointed out.

"Hear me out," Merrill said. "We make the grounding array just as it was made in arlathan, then, instead of the source-nodes to draw off energy for the recharge from the fade, there is a special function within the tree's roots, that gives the array the extra push it needs to continue to cycle through. We make the spells self-contained, self-replicating and symbiotic!"

Wisdom reviewed the concept, making changes here and there, then she created an enormous blank three-dimensional representation of Merrill's spell-web array for her project, and set alongside it a great blank work-board. Then, as if Merrill were a da'len set to her mathematics lessons, she made Merrill write out the mathematical-magical formulas for each and every last node, source node, gate-node anchor point and ley-line in the entire array, keeping a running tally of its magical cost and the projected growth rate of the self-replicating energy-harvesters. She made Merrill balance the entire array down to the very last speck of magical energy. Wisdom went along behind her, correcting her every little error and showing her the places where the spell-web would fail due to imbalance.

 _:I think my new assessment of the Ancient Elves must be right,:_ Merrill thought in exhausted exasperation after she had had to go back and re-code an entire flipping sub-spell-web because of one tiny numerical error that had thrown the whole thing off. _:They were all of them just mathy! Clerkish, finicky, obsessive, abstract, number-worshiping know-it-alls!:_

Somehow the thought of the mythic, powerful ancient mages of yore being gathered around a slate-board slaving away at scribbling out long, complicated magical formulae from dawn until dusk (as she was being forced to right then) was both extremely satisfying and a utterly disappointing. She, and every other Dalish elf she knew of, all thought of the elves of arlathan as being  somehow magically superior, they just waved a hand and made magic happen, it quite made the shine of their supposed great magics diminish when she realized that they were all just being mathy clerks about it.

It felt like it took absolutely forever for Merrill to finish going node by node, ley-line by ley-line, working out all of the energy-cost and spell-function computations and balancing them on the master grid one by one, parsing out every last finicky detail accounting for every last tiny speck of energy on the whole damnable thing (and actually somewhat regretting ever having brought the project up at all!). It felt like it took, not hours, but _days_ to go through every function, line by line, and break it all down to the energy of numbers, write out the formulae for the function, balance the formulae into a self-contained unit, then balance that unit against the on-going master project. Wisdom helpfully told her when a function was incorrect, but only after she'd already finished it, so she had to go back, unravel the entire thing, figure out where a correction would need to be made, come up with a new formula to address that correction and make certain that not only the unit balanced, but that it balanced with the energy cost on the master grid.

"There!" Merrill said as she closed off the last end node and set it into place on the master spellweb array.

Her enthusiasm had long since faded in the almost unending death-march of math that was what her project had turned into once Wisdom had gotten hold of it and wanted to "balance it properly." Now all she felt was a mental exhaustion so thick she wanted to fall asleep in her dreams.

Wisdom looked over teh three-dimensional master array which was shaped rather more like an orb with hexagon-shaped facets and a complex inner-spellweb woven inside of it. The orbish-shaped thing exploded outwards and all of the lesser spell-webs and function arrays spread apart. The whiteboard began to flicker with the magical formulae as light, representing magical energy, raced along its ley-lines, activating the internal spellwebs. Merrill watched in tired fascination as, over the flat surface of the eluvian-tabletop, the grounding array wrote itself with the spell-seed in its center.

The seed activated, weaving its beginning functions into the grounding array and began to grow. First it sprouted upwards, a thin shoot with magical processing spellwebs weaving into the energy-collectors on its leaves. Then it began to grow in earnest, the spellweb arrays self-replicating alongside and intertwined with the plants natural processes, just exactly as Merrill had envisioned! The sapling grew into a sizable tree, and once of a suitable size and stability, the magical-harvester spellwebs began to activate, collecting the energy of the sun in order to activate its magical-energy-harvesting spellwebs and keep them cycling, pulling in magical energy and sending it into the core of the tree to be processed. The magical energy raced through ley-line built into the natural lines of the tree that transported sugars from the leaves to the trunk. The tree-figment flowered and then the first of the fruits began to form. Spell-cores formed like seeds and began their self-contained spells that would process and store magical energy in a physical form around them, all protected by a thick iron-bark shell to keep the volatile energy-fruit safe. The resulting magic-fruits looked a little bit like pomegranates, with the stabilizing spell-seeds surrounded by a jelly of brightly glowing stabilized magical energy that had been harvested, processed and stored by the internal workings of the spell-tree.

"It works!" Merrill shouted jubilantly, exhaustion forgotten now in the exhilaration of the fact that, according to the math the primary grid and thus the entire plant itself was stable, viable and self-renewing.

Wisdom continued to run the project through several more cycles of energy harvesting and processing just to be certain of the projects continuing stability while Merrill basked in the delight of the thought of her energy-collecting tree.

"It really works," she murmured happily.

"Well, I'm glad you're happy missus," Lucien said, looking at the spectral image of Merrill's future magical energy-making tree hovering in the air before them. "But I really don't see what all the fuss is about."

"Magic as it exists currently is limited in what it can do, usually to the power of one single mage and whatever magical energy that mage is able to pull across the veil from the Fade," Merrill explained patiently.

She knew that limitation all too well. Every mage who had ever practiced magic had run up against that limitation. Some simply accepted it, others like herself, found ways to work around it. The magisters of Tevinter used the blood-energy of others to pay the price of their magic, Merrill used her own, those with the means to do so bought Lyrium from the Dwarves.

"Wisdom," Merrill said, a continual nagging bit of curiosity occuring to her. "Is my theory about the elves of Arlathan tampering with plants to enhance their magical capabilities true?"

"Yes," Wisdom said absently, still testing the stability and self-replicating ability of Merrills spellweb. "The plant that modern elves call elfroot is one such. It was modified from several different strains of varying usefulness into one plant that even the ancients found to be quite useful. It was not intended to spread like a natural plant, but Sylaise was nothing if not thorough in her work."

Merrill ignored her ow excitement at the mention of the Goddess and instead asked the question that her project had prompted within her.

"If that is so, then why didn't they make a magical plant like this to pull energy across the Veil?"

"It was unnecessary," Wisdom replied. "Magic as you understand it today worked differently then. That is all I will say on the matter."

Merrill was curious about how it had worked differently, but she'd learned to be practical over the years. Magic worked differently now, so, she would develop a way to bring the old magical systems into the current era and make them work. The energy-harvesting tree was the first step. If she had what might essentially amount to enough lyrium on hand to augment her own slender resources, then she could design the spellwebs she needed without fearing the initial start-up cost, which under normal circumstances would have been for too great for her to handle on her own.

 _:And once I can write up new spellwebs and activate them so that they cycle on as the ancients magical technlogy did, there may be no end to what I might acheive. Think of how I could help the people!:_ she thought, a small feeling of real, true hope welling up within her.

"There would need to be a great deal of study done on the solidified magical substance that you have formed around the stabilizing cores after you have harvested the first of your fruits. This project of yours is something that has not been attempted before since the days of Arlathan. The solidified magical energy is sound in concept, but in reality may turn out to be unstable. Still... it is interesting. You've a strange mind Merrill. I will continue to test the spellweb array for soundness while you bide in the other realm. Your body calls you to wake, Merrill, I shall await your return here."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we have the turning point. I'd started this thing with no particular notion of where it might be going, but then I thought of how much Merrill must have learned about how ancient elven magic was coded simply by studying and recreating an almost-working eluvian from a single tinted shard. With just a little more work and a nudge in the right direction, she might have figured out the answer herself!   
> Then I thought about how she'd been raised to be a Keeper, and to protect her Clan, which she would likely feel she failed at doing, and about how Merrill still really cares about people, her people. Her dialogue toward the end seems to suggest that she's slowly coming around to thinking of the Alienage elves as possibly being hers too and that she might possibly be feeling the lack of a people to protect as she had been raised to do.   
> Well... a plot to this thing finally happened, so look forward to it please!


	15. Chapter 15

Merrill opened her eyes to see that it was _late_ morning again, but this time, Fenris had not taken it upon himself to wake her up, bucket or no bucket. Merrill had a _pounding_ headache to end all headaches, and she felt groggy and in desperate need of a strong cup of morning tea.

"Pontius!" she called out as she almost literally crawled out of bed and pulled on her worn, nearly ragged, Vestments of the First before she ventured out into the kitchen to see about breakfast. "Put the kettle on!"

She found Fenris not quite pacing the kitchen, but despite his casual pose even Merrill could tell he had been there a while.

"About time you were awake, lazy witch!" he greeted her.

"Good morning to you too, Fenris," she yawned.

Pontius was already puttering about filling a kettle with water from the tap, and setting up Merrill's favorite teapot with a double-dose of black leaves for morning tea. Merrill reached into the cold-pantry and pulled some already-prepared dough for morning rolls.

 _:He seems in a bit of mood this morning so it might be a good idea to try and sweeten that temper of his a bit before I take over his back garden for my work,:_ Merrill thought with secret anticipation.

Merrill had picked some sweets up from the market the day before and, as she wanted her erstwhile housemate delighted with tasty things and _not_ wondering why she'd suddenly started sleeping in so late, Merrill decided that she'd just pull out the heavy hitting battle-spells and make something called sweet-bark rolls. She'd tried some at the market once and they were nothing shy of confectionery heaven!

"Up all night reading again, I see," he remarked frowning in disapporoval of her late rising habits.

"I"ll be working in the back garden today," Merrill replied, ignoring his disapproval. "You promised I could, and the herbs are expensive so it' makes more sense for me to grow my own. No telling what other things those cheaty merchant herbalists have been watering down thier stock with. If I grow it myself, there's no need to wonder about it.

Fernis sighed and looked unhappy, but couldn't argue the point as Merrill rolled out the dough onto the counter and left it there to finish growing fluffy then mixed sweet bark and white sweet-crystals into a bowl and melted some butter.

"Very well, witch," he said resignedly. "I suppose there is no harm in letting you putter about the garden with your planting hobby."

Merrill kept her mouth absolutely shut about her experiment, for if Fenris knew about it he would certainly forbid her to try it.

 _:After all, it's not dangerous,:_ Merrill justified to herself over the guilt of keeping such a secret from him, knowing that he'd be angry if he found out. _:Wisdom herself has been over every last spellweb in the whole array with a fine-toothed comb and tested it out in simulation. She's supervised similar projects in the ancient past, so I'm sure if there were anything wrong with my work she would tell me. And I'll also be planting herbs too, so I'm not entirely lying, just... not telling all of the truth._ :

"There's been talk of a Purge," Merrill said, partly to change the subject and partly because it was on her mind.

The elves of the Alieange had asked her to leave, more or less, because harboring a known mage in their Alienage would eventually bring down the wrong sort of attention on them, and they had a hard time just getting by in general. Merrill hoped to soon have the means to help them help themselves, though it would probably take a lot more of... _everything_. More work, more study, more invention, more magic.

"There's always talk of a Purge, especially since the Viscount's been dead," Fenris replied. "But yes, it's even more dangerous now. People are unhappy, and when the humans suffer, the elves suffer worse."

"Why is it like that though?" Merrill asked. "I mean, I understand that the Shem are greedy and they can't help their brutish natures, but if the Alienage is supposed to be a place that is safe from Shemlen interference, why are they allowed to interfere?"

"No place is safe from Human interference," Fenris replied. "Even the Dalish flee in fear of it."

Merrill sniffed as his implication that her people were cowards but really couldn't argue the point either.

When the dough was ready she rolled it flat then sliced it into wide flat strips which she then brushed with a thick mixture of melted butter and sweet bark and sugar and a few other spices. She rolled them tightly while Lucien obligingly set the oven to warming, and then Merrill took the sweet rolls and laid them spaced out evenly on large, flat stone sheet, then set it in the oven.

"I see that the armored magical freak has fully cleared out the garden," Fenris remarked as Merrill pulled the kettle of water for her nice, full pot of morning tea off the fire and poured it over the basket of herbal matte.

Curious, Merrill peeked out the window and discovered that Fenris was correct once again. All of the wild greenery that had been growing over the walls and along every surface it could climb up was hacked up in a large pile next to the fountain, waiting for Merrill to turn it into green mulch to help feed the soil.

"Oh, the garden looks entirely different now!" Merrill remarked.

The garden before had looked a bit dark and shaded with the thick little trees of ivy climbing all over everything, making a veritable bush out of the pergola and turning the walls into something that looked rather like a monstrous hedge that might eat dogs and small children. Once the overgrown shrubbery was cleared away, the walls beneath were revealed to be of a pale honey-colored stone that reflected the light and made the space seem larger, especially now that it was all uncluttered by wildlife. Now Merrill might get to try out creating that new plant that she and Wisdom had worked on the night before.

"I assume, by your delighted expression, that you have certain plans for the place now that it's been made ready for you?" Fenris said a bit archly.

"Well, I'll have to treat the soil first as it's been leeched of nutrients over time," Merrill chatted happily away while the rolls cooked in the oven. "But I _do_ have some seedlings all set to plant. Elfroot of course, as it's the base for most potions, but some others too. Why buy from those expensive herbalists when I can grow my own better?"

"You _have_ money," Fenris pointed out dryly.

"But who knows what they've done to their stock?" Merrill replied not adding in that she'd hardly trust a shem to know what he was doing when it came to plants.

Merrill hid her smile of amusement as Fenris sniffed the air once the rolls started to really cook, recalling only now how puzzled Lucien had been about the phenomena known as "scent."

When she judged that the rolls were close to ready to pull out of the oven, Merrill started making omlettes with the leftover ingredients from the evening before. She sliced bacon fresh off the rasher to fry up with it, letting some slip down to Lucien while she cooked who munched on it happily. Omelttes were joined by a small batch of porride as she was going to need her strength for the upcoming yardwork (and laying in the first of the wards for the magical grounding array for her new spell-tree.

Merrill turned away to pour herself a nice large mug of fresh morning tea to wake her up and turned back to discover Pontius plating up the omlettes, bacon, toast and frosting the rolls with the mixture of cream, sugar and sweet-bark she'd made for them. Fenris looked amused by the put-out expression on Merrills face as the mechanical butler moved the plates to the table and pulled out her chair.

"Thank-you Pontius," Merrill said resignedly. "And thank-you again for all of your hard work on the garden."

"Of course, mum," the spirit-butler said.

The look of surprise, amazement and delight on Fenris' face as he bit into the warm gooey confection made the effort worth the extra effort it took and Merrill could go back to work on her projects with a clear(er) conscience, secure that she was keeping up her end of the bargain.

 _:Though I really do think he could use a hobby,:_ Merrill thought. _:Maybe he could take up gambling, and then loose badly to those who sorely need the coin? Oh but then he'd get to be known as an easy mark and his pride would never stand for it.:_

Merrill tucked her concerns for her housemate away in a corner of her mind as she finished her breakfast and left the clean-up to her overly-diligent butler spirit while she went to survey the garden. The very first thing she did was roll a few of the empty barrels over to the spot in between the garden fountain and the huge pile of weeds, branches and other greenery that Pontius had valiantly pruned and pulled from their former places. Using a bucket she half-filled the barrels with water, then, using several magic spells in tandem, got to the work of chopping, chipping, crushing and squishing the recalcitrant greenery into green mulch, which she then shoveled into the barrels and mixed round with the water and some soil to form a muddy sort of thin gruel of plant-food. Waste could actually be purchased int he city, Merrill had been astonished to discover this fact a few years ago, and she'd purchased some earlier with the intention of adding it to her garden mulch, which she did, increasing and enhancing the mixtures fertilizing qualities with the application of magic.

"Well, it's smelly, but it should do the job wonderfully!" Merrill congratulated herself on testing the consistency of the magically enhanced mulch in the barrels and adding more dirt to thicken it up enough to be shoveled out and applied to her garden.

Pontius had done a great deal of the clearing out and turning over of the soil, his furrows had gone deep down into the hard-packed dirt and loosened up the rock-hard soil enough to be worked with. Merrill got out a shovel and started spreading the earthy-smelling paste evenly through the garden, turning and tilling the dirt with her magic as she went, pushing the nutrients down deeper to replenish the soil. Pontius, of course, quietly showed up the very moment she picked up a shovel and looked like she was gong to start doing manual labor, and followed along at her direction, spreading the fertilizer and tilling the soil along with her. Bees from a nearby hive that Merrill had ordered the automaton to leave untouched when he cleared out the garden filled the air with the soft gentle hum of their buzzing.

"Did you know that bees communicate by the way they hover and dance in midair, Pontius?" Merrill asked after a while, resting on the shovel for a moment to take a break from the costly magical and physical labor.

"No mum," the butler replied stolidly.

"Oh yes," she went on, always happy to share her knowledge. "They have a very complex way of communicating, my Keeper told me. They can tell another of their sort about where to find food and how far away it is, they can discuss the weather and temperature and how fast the wind is blowing!"

Since she had not asked an opinion and merely expressed an observation, Pontius did not reply, but Merrill continued on anyway, overlooking the beehive with fearless curiosity, examining minutely the way that the honeycombs were shaped, growing almost organically out to fill up space as needed. It rather reminded her a little bit of the self-replicating spellwebs from the night before.

"And just look at how they set up their hive!" she said in cheerful admiration. "Everything is compact to make the best use of space but the way they structure their supports strengthens it. Even the way their honeycombs are shaped is perfect for packing the most into every little bit of space they have, and they can keep growing more onto it. Wouldn't it be neat to be a bee and live in a hive, everyone all working together and singing songs all day long? And we'd all get to eat honey!"

Pontius didn't reply to her musing fancy, but instead continued to work on mulching and tilling the garden. Merrill tucked her notion about the superior structural support of the beehive away and continued to use her magic to push the nutrients down deep into the soil as she worked. While she was going over each inch of the soil, tilling and mulching, she also measured out the section in the back leftmost side of the garden that the underlying grounding-array for her spell tree and marked out a careful grid pattern in the soil with cairns of white stones. In the other parts of the garden, once the mulching and tilling was finished with, Merrill and Pontius both made deep furrows in neat, evenly spaced lines for her to plant her selection of medicinal herbs.

"Whew!" Merrill said, resting again hours later and surveying their work with a leased smile. "That was hard work! I wonder how farmers do it all by hand and they don't even have any magic or a mechanical butler at all. I think after I clean up I'll put on my clean Vestment and go to the market at Hightown, I want to get some seeds for the rarer herbs like Crystal Grace, as well as some of the seeds I can't get easily down here. Plus, I promised Perram that I'd meet up with him. I could give him the medicines I've bottled to give to the alienage to help out, since they don't seem to want me there."

"Very good mum," Pontius agreed.

They put in a sweaty, dirty mornings work but when they were done the whole patch of garden was ready to be planted, minus the pathways to the fountain Merrill saw no reason not to leave in as they separated the areas of garden quite nicely. 

"That's quite a bit of work, isnt it?" she remarked to Pontius.

"I would not know, Mum," Pontius said honestly. "I do not feel physical strain as you do. I can either perform a function or I cannot."

"Oh. Right. Well, I'm for a good rest and..."

The soaking tub that Merrill knew to still be clean and filled with hot water caught her eye.

"Even better!" she decided brightly.

She stripped down out of her sweaty clothes and washed up in the fountain, requesting that Pontius take her dirty Vestments and wash them. After she was scrubbed clean, Merrill nipped across the yard and pulled back the lid on the soaking tub, pleased to see that it was fine and still clean after a few days neglect, she dipped into the gloriously hot water and enjoyed a nice soak in the sunshine.

"Why are you bathing stark naked in the middle of the day?" Fenris called down from his perch up in the balcony off his bedroom.

Merrill started and looked up and over.

"I'm tired and dirty, or I was." she replied. "My muscles are sore from the yardwork. I suppose you expect me to soak fully clothed, do you?"

"You're supposed to wear a bathing costume when you soak outside," he informed her with a superior tone.

Merrill just stared at him oddly for a long, long moment.

"Are you telling me that these crazy shem load themselves down with clothes while they're in the water too? How very strange. Special clothes for sleeping, special clothes for eating, special clothes for bathing in..." Merrill shook her head at the absurdity of it all. "Are you quite certain that the Shemlen society is not being covertly run and manipulated by a secret society of tailors bent on keeping themselves in business, or perhaps world domination?"

"Orlais certainly may well be," Fenris said, almost nodding in agreement. "But besides that, the neighbors might look over and see you naked."

"What do I care if they look over and see me naked? There's nothing wrong with me," Merrill said.

Fenris just gave another of those sighs that said she'd probably missed the point entirely. Deciding that she'd been slothful in her soaking for long enough, Merrill pulled herself out of the soaking tub just as Pontius emerged with one of those tiny fluffy blankets that were used to wipe water off skin and a fresh set of Vestments for her to wear. Merrill looked with concern at another minor hole worn in the fabric on one side. Her clothes were wearing out and it wasn't as though she could go to the Dalish and ask for more. Technically, as she was an exile and _not_ the First of Sabrae Clan anymore, Merrill wasn't supposed to be wearing the Vestments of the First, but she just couldn't bring herself to let them go.

 _:The Alienage is supposed to be my new Clan now, so I really should see more about helping them out,:_ Merrill told herself. _:I hope they will let me come back soon. With my new understanding of spellwebs, and the magical burden lessened, I might be able to help them a lot if they would just let me.:_

Merrill didn't have any sort of real plan, right then. She had a few ideas that, if her experiment with the magic-harvesting and storing tree worked, might be made feasible, but that wouldn't be for a little while yet. For now, all she could do was do what she could; plan and study and grow her knowledge. She was going to study hard and learn as much as she could, she was going to get better and more practiced at mathing and casting spellwebs. She might not be able to offer them a powerful artifact like an eluvian, but her recent studies had shown her that the mythic power of the Acine Elves of Arlathan hadn't actually been all that powerful in the sense of raw magical power as every Keeper and First had always assumed.

:All of thier power comes from the knowledge of how the world works on the level of the very small, and then manipulating the information they know about the world,: Merrill thought, still glowing inside from the momentous, though still stangely underwhelming revelation.

Arlathan's spellwebs had layered on complexity over a sound core structure, but a single spellweb was thin as gossamer when it came to talking about raw magical power flowing through it. The strength of thier technology showed through in how they wove thier simple workings together.

:A good analogy might be to look at silk,: Merrill mused to herself. :A single spellweb is like a single strand of silk, thin, delicate and not terribly strong all on its own, but when it is woven in tightly with other strands of silk into a cloth structure, it can catch a blade when maneuvered right! Rather like the principle of vir tanadhal.:

Dried off and dressed, Merrill went into the house through the backdoor in the kitchen, then turned down the hallway to the library, activated the wonderous mechanical table in order to access the safe with coin pouches hidden underneath.

"I really should nip down to the safe soon and replenish the supply of coin pouches," Merrill mused to herself as she pulled out another pouch full of coins of different denominations.

She wasn't certain what Fenris had been out buying the day before, but he had somehow managed to burn through all of the coin pouches save that last one in the safe, either that, or he was hiding the remainder of his coin in his room, which she supposed would make sense. After separating out her coin and hiding it in various different places around her body as Isabella had taught her to do while she was carrying a lot and planning on shopping, Merrill walked back down the hall and into the kitchen to gather up her large market-basket. She filled the large basket with all of the wine-bottles she'd made the night previous for the elves of the Alienage to use. Once she was finished with cramming all of them in the basket, padded by wadded strips of linen taken from the linens around the house that had been cleaned but were  not salvageable as anything other than rags.

The Hightown Market was neat and very cleanly, interspersed with lovely gardens for the wealthy to rest themselves in while they shopped. Merrill had noticed that, since the wealthy did not go to the market to purchase the things they needed to live, like food, they tended to treat shopping as more of a social exursion. They left the sort of shopping that most people went to market for, such as buying food and sundries to support thier familieies, to thier servants and the wealthy elite spent thier shopping time, buying luxury items at exhorbitant prices. Merrill watched, still feeling a vague disoriented confusion at the wastefulness of it all, as a gaggle of women with thier young daughters in tow went into a merchant selling "exotic silks from Antiva" and spent the same amount of coin for a few bolts of cloth as Merrill would have to feed the entire alienage for a month. And there were a lot of hungry mouths on the alienge.

:And I know for a fact that that's so-called Merchant selling the supposed "exotic silks from far away Antiva" has a small farm of illegal silk-worms in his house and he whips the silken cloth out of a few of the weaver-elves at my Alienage for a bare pittance!: Merrill thought in outrage.

She'd half a mind to expose him for the lying cheat he was, but the man paid his bribes carefully, and the elves who worked for him were too afraid of his backers to make a fuss, plus, "it might be a pittance but at least it's work," so far as the elves in question were concerned. It was just enough for them to scrape by on and they would take what they could get. She was going to have to be satisfied with the knowledge that, even though the cheater merchant was making a ridiculous profit from her own elve's poverty, at least he wasn't getting to enjoy all of it, he doled out a significant amount in bribes.

Merrill sat underneath the shady awning of a tree in the central garden of the marketplace in hightown and mused about what city life was actually like.

:Why can't my elves have things this nice?: she wondered to herself.

It wasn't as though they were incapable of making the wares she saw when she looked around her. She knew for dead certain that much of, if not most of, the wares currently glittering on the tables of the merchants and being sold for ridiculous prices to a bored and wealthy clientele were in fact made by elves she knew in the alienage. The merchnt who sold swords and daggers of "fine and exotic make" was far less exotic than he would have his clientele believe, for she knew the elf in the alienage who worked one of his local forges. There were others too, pottery and ceramic workers, jewelers, carvers, leatherworkers, all of them knew the art of fine working, but all of them were forced to work at a bare pittance to produce finely crafted work that the shemlen merchant sold at a staggering profit. The elves who made these crafts worked for the merchants for a pttance mostly, one to feed thier families, and two, because they had no means to attain the materials they needed to produce the products themselves due to the institutionalized poverty and the fact that the shemlen who had the permits neccessary to bring in the raw goods charged the elves excessively to the point where they would have been taking a loss.

:It's too bad I can't make an eluvian,: she thought sourly with a familiar knot of frustration at the way that the shem all conspired to take advantage of her people in every way they could while still keeping them all poor and oppressed. :That way I could just gather the raw goods and smuggle them directly to my people without having to dodge patrols or tarrif or anything.:

But the scenario, Wisdom had explained to her when Merrill had asked about building an eluvian the night before, would take raw materials she did not have access to, magic she did not currently have the means to make work, and time she did not have. Merrill had been disappointed and disheartened to hear of it, but there was something in the way Wisdom had given her reply that had made Merrill hope that there might be a way, eventually, that Merrill might be able to design a creative wayto get around the limitations she faced.

:But I suppose that's all fluff and dreams for now, oh! There's Perram!: she thought, sighting her little friend from the alienage.

"Perram!" she called, waving him over.

The young elf hurried over, not having found anyone currently in the marketplance who was in need of his haggling services. Most of the wealthy who were shopping that day were so overly loaded with money that haggling was less of a neccessity and more of a game or a polite social nicety.

"Hey Merrill," he greeted cheerfully. "I saw your friend yesterday. The cranky one with the sword?"

"Fenris," Merrill supplied with a nod. "Was he truly arrested for having too much coin?"

"Ol' Atrikus is a well-known elf-despiser. He's Orlesian y'know?" Perram said with a shrug. "He's made it his life's mission to get me kicked out of the market permanent. Looks like he might manage it too, what with that new Sister gaining so much influence among the nobles."

"New Sister?" Merrill asked.

"Oh! I guess you don't keep up on that on account you don't worship the Maker," Perram said.

Merrill shook her head.

"Well, you know how that guy you used ta know blew up the Chantry and most of the Chantry Sisters in it died in the blast?"

Merrill nodded, still a bit uncomfortable with thinking of her kind, if a trifle hypocritical, dear friend in the same light as crazed fanatic who blew up a chanty and killed innocent people to make a statement. It just didn't seem like Anders, who worked himself to the bone providing care for the poorest and sickest who needed it most but could afford it the least.

"Well the Sister's died in the blast, but there's a small group of lay-sister and lay-brothers who made it through unscathed cuz they were somewhere else when the explosion happened. The Chantry in Val Royeaux sent supplies, medicine, food, bandages and the like to be handed out by the Chantry, not realizing that most of the staff was dead. Well the remainder has banded together and started rebuilding."

"That's good, right?" Merrill said, pleased that things were going well for them.

Sebastian would be happy, cetainly, as he was so very fond of the Chantry.

"Well... yes and no," Perram said. "There's no official appointed to be in charge of the Chantry so there's this lay-sister, Janelle, who's stepped up to make herself the new leader of the Chantry. Only problem is that she's not the "get-along" type of Sister, but more of the "find a scapegoat and whip people up into a frenzy of fear and paranoia in order to consolidate her power" sort of Sister. From all we can tell, she's seized power by hook or by crook, and bullied all the remaining laymen into line. that in itself might not be so bad, the Chanty is being rebuilt and emergency supplies are being handed out. The only problem is, the suplies under Chantry control are only being handed out to "those with the most need."

"So that should be fine then," Merrill said. "Everyone who needs some can get some."

Merrill, while she might dislike the Chantry as an institution for getting rid of Shartan from thier holy-Story, she liked them as an ideal for Sebastian had explained to her that they were essentially like Keepers, just the same as she had been trained to be. They took care of the sick, the poor, the hungry and any widows and orphans who could not keep themselves.

"You missed my sarcasm," Perram informed her. "When I said those with most need what I meant was, only those they feel should get the supplies and not neccessarily those who need them most. For instance, she's turning our hungry away at the door. We've already had to send most of our able-bodied elves out of the city in order to make it so that the smallest and weakest of us could have a chance to recive emercency aid from the Chantry, but this Sister Janelle is turning away even those."

"Maybe they're out of supplies?" Merrill guessed dubuiously.

"We've stuck around and watched, while, right after turning away a knot of hungry orphans from the alienage, she took in some not-so-hungry Shemlen who asked her for food!" Perram said, not disguising his outrage.

Merrill frowned.

"Well maybe I should go down there and talk with her, Keeper to Keeper, and tell her notto treat people unfairly."

"Don't do that!" Perram protested immediately.

"Why not?" she asked.

"For one, we already tried it. Our Hahren, Ol' Yama, confronted her about her unfair treatment a week ago, thinking she'd just made a mistake, he was old and small as they come and she cast him off her doorstep and then adressed the crowd saying that elves were by thier nature tainted with foul magic that corrupt us and make us all naturally inferior to the shemlen and that we need to be kept in our place for our own good."

Merrill felt a growl well up in her throat, and gripped the handle of her market basket, wishing it was a staff instead. She'd like to go down there and put her in her place!

"And then," Perram continued. "The crowd, whipped up by that woman, set on our Hahren! He... he didn't make it. He was old and he couldn't fight them off."

"What?!" Merrill said in shock. "They killed him?"

"Officially, he stumbled and was trampled over," Perram said bitterly. "But we know the truth. He influence is only growing stronger, and she's outright anti-elven, doesn't even make a secret of it. She can get away with big lies and little lies, even unsubstantiated rumors are treated like fact if she says so, and even when people stand up to her, no-one wants to listen to them because what she's saying sounds good to people. The elves are in trouble. There's gonna be a Purge, we all know it, and our gate ain't gonna hold them off. The warrens, where we would have been able to hide are gone because of the fires and the collapses. We've got sick too."

It was clear that all of his worry and fear had been bottled up in the need to get on with his life and make a living, but he was scared and Merrill couldn't blame him. She wished that there were more she could do.

Merrill sighed unhappily and said

"At least that I can do something about. Here, take this basket, it's got potions to heal the sick in it. Use as much as you need, I'm here to buy seeds for herbs to grow in my garden and I'll be brewing more potions as soon as I can."

"Thanks Merrill, I knew you were a good one," Perram said with a small, wan smile.

"Any word on the Alienage letting me back in to help?" she asked hopefully. "I'm sure I can do more than brew potions."

Perram sighed sadly.

"I know you probably could, but with that awful Sister Janelle whipping people into a frenzy over magic and the elves, the shem just looking for an excuse to start trouble and we don't even have an alienage to protect us anymore. it's all collapsed in, and what didn't collapse had burned down mostly. We... have no home and no hope. Some of us... well, we've given up an' that's the truth."

Merrill took his words like a blow directly to her own heart. She had been raised among a proud people, a people who took enormous pride in the fact that they were elven and secretly better than any other people out there, it hurt her on a visceral level to hear of elves giving up on themselves. The Dalish often wondered if City Elves had no sense of elven pride but Merrill had slowly (very slowly!) come to see that this wasn't so, they were poor and oppressed, but their pride in their elvinity was all the stronger for it. To hear that the City Elves had given up on themselves, that all of the misfortunes had caused them to surrender to despair, was a grievous blow for Merrill knew of few people who were prouder of their sense of community than they.

"Tell them don't give up," Merrill said quietly, with intensity, a sudden fire and ferocity surging within her. "Tell them, Perram. Tell them don't ever give up. We are elves. Magic is in our blood and our very nature but it does not lessen us... we are stronger for it because it is what we are meant to be. Tell them that. Tell them that what was lost can be regained, tell them there is hope."

"Pfft," he snorted. "I'd say tell 'em yourself but you know that we all aren't the sort to believe in mere words anymore. If yer gonna make them any promises about there being any hope after all that's happened, you better bring along a lot more than some pretty words. We're exhausted Merrill. We've tried and we've been trying and now we have nothing to show for any of it and we're all at our end. If you want to come down there with nothing but words about hope, no-one will listen. You'd better bring some action."

Merrill listened to his words quietly, then nodded.

"Ma nuvenin," she said with a firm nod, her feelings, which had been grey and muddled about what she should do and whether or not she should interfere, whether or not she deserved to interfere, suddenly crystallized.

She wouldn't stand idly by, not anymore. She'd take action, as she had before, but she would be wiser this time, not make the same mistakes. She was going to reach out to them, to trust them and ask for their help this time instead of assuming she knew best and could shoulder the burden on her own. Merrill would help them, but she would do it by helping them rebuild their community. She would do it more humbly, she would seek more and assume less. She couldn't bring back her Keeper, she couldn't erase her past mistakes, but by the Creators she could learn from them and walk on her own path believing in her own possibilities.

"Looks like someone's got a fire lit inside them," the irrepressible scamp said.

"I have a lot of work ahead of me, Perram," Merrill acknowledged."I've learned a ot even though I failed to acheive my goal. And I plan to learn even more. I'm certain that what I've learned can be used to help the alienage. I want to try, at least. Could you tell them that?"

"I'll talk to the others on your behalf," Perram promised. "These potions should go a long way toward smoothing things over. I don't know how keen anyone will be on trying outwhatever it is you've learned about. With the Chantry being such a pain, we elves are a bit wary about using magic where anyone can see us. Still, I will say that most of us have had it to the back teeth with taking shit from the shem. If you come with something that can give us a leg-up, they might all just listen."

"What if what I have in mind is... radically different from anything they know?" Merrill asked, feeling the familiar self-doubt creep in.

"Like I said, we're almost at rock bottom. The one's whove given up wanna stay there. It's gonna be your job to convince them that going up is an option ad it won't be easy."

"My Keeper always said, "try the hard path first, da'len, then if that does not work then you will have known that the most difficult thing is already out of the way." Of course, she didn't expect me my life to turn out like this when she advised me like that, but, sometimes failure is only the success of learning that one way doesn't work."

"Well, good luck on finding what does work, I guess," Perram said. "I'm curious to see what you come up with."


	16. Chapter 16

Merrill departed the marketplace with a forceful feeling of determination. She was going to help the Alienage somehow, she just needed to figure out how. For that, she figured she needed two things to start with; more knowledge, which she actually had a chance to learn thanks to Wisdom being such a fount of information, and more magic.

_:If I don't need more information and magic right now, I undoubtedly will in the future if my idea for spellwebs is going to work,:_ Merrill thought. _:So I should get my spell-tree planted and growing sooner rather than later, and I should also come up with a more efficient way of gaining information from Wisdom than casting my mind through the Veilto visit her in the Fade... it's nt always convenient for me to find a place to go unconscious for a few hours.:_

She knew it was very going to mean a _row_ with Fenris once he discovered her little magical project growing in his back yard without his express permission, but Merrill had thought of an easy way to soothe her housemate's temper on that score; she planned to tell him that she had known that her using blood magic to power her spells bothered him, so she'd developed an alternate way to gain the magic she needed for her work that wouldn't upset him so much. She rather hoped that he'd let it go at that and be pleased with it, or at least, _less displeased_ , but she rather doubted it would be the case.

_:But that's for the future to worry about, and perhaps by the time it becomes and issue, I'll have thought of something to keep his temper from exploding,:_ Merrill thought, letting herself into the backyard and surveying the area that she and Poncy had marked out for the spell-tree's grounding array. She'd designed the grounding array with Wisdom to incorporate some of the strongest grounding wards and emergency protocols she'd ever seen before so that she could proceed with her experiment confident that it was safe. Or at least, it was safer than any other magical undertaking she'd ever tried in her life. She mostly just didnt want to hear Fenris carp and fuss about it.

The plot tucked away in the back of the garden near the fountain was already furrowed and especially well-treated with mulch and nutrients, Merrill had wanted to start on her experiment sooner rather than later. The ground had been carefully measured down to the last finger-width for the grounding spellweb-array that she and Wisdom had developed for the ever-expanding self-replicating spell-tree's inner spellwebs required very precise measurements.

The array itself was made to expand outward to accommodate the growth of the spell-tree. The innermost array had two complimentary closed systems that worked off each other in a symbiotic manner. One system monitored the spellwebs of the spell-tree to regulate it's energy intake and storage facilities, as well as trigger its growth-states, telling it when to flower and when to go into stasis-mode to conserve energy. The other system held most of the emergency procedures and protocols, it took the energy information supplied by the first array and determined whether it would be necessary to trigger a sudden energy sink into the grounding arrays at the tree's roots, or even, in the case of a dangerous energy surge, whether it would be necessary to destroy parts of the tree in order to quickly disperse magical power so that there would not be the risk of a chain reaction causing the entire spell-tree to explode. The grounding arrays were designed for regulation, control and containment most of all. Merrill didn't want anyone getting hurt, so she and Wisdom had designed the tightest, most effective and powerful containment spellwebs they could feasibly get to work with the resorces that Merrill would realistically be able to muster on her own.

Each system had three anchor points, from which a number of spellweb-arrays branched off. The spellwebs on each of those anchor-points held decision-trees designed to deal with various situations that might arise within the main spellwebs of the growing spelltree's containing instructions on what to do if such an emergency should arise. The two grids were shaped like triangles at the anchor points with all of the anchors connected in a circle, creating a six-pointed star. Once the tree had reached a certain growth threshold, the two complimentary inner arrays would transform into the second grounding spellweb array, expanding outward to the next circle, which had a more complex array of three interlocked anchor-arrays that formed a nine-pointed star arranged in a circle. This grid held tighter, more powerful grounds and protections, just in case something went wrong. Likewise for the third, outer-most ring which held a set of thirteen independent, closed-loop arrays that interlocked together. These arrays were programed protocols to hopefully cover every eventuality, and they held the most powerful grounding and containment wards Merrill had ever seen.

_:I want to start on it right away,_ : Merrill thought longingly as she unpacked her basket with the packets of seeds that she and Perram had bought from the over-priced herbalist in the Hightown Market before they had parted ways. _:Unfortunately, the array itself is simply too costly in terms of magical energy expenditure for me to cast unassisted.:_

It seemed like Merrill was always running up against the upper limit of what it was possible for her to achieve using solely her own magical power.

_:A single spellweb does not require a lot of energy by itself, nor, does it take a great deal of power to put the structure of interlocked arrays in place,:_ Merrill thought as she began digging in the dirt on the other side of the garden, planting the first set of her elfroot seeds and pushing a little nature magic into them to give them a little boost to aid their growth. She worked her way down the garden plot she'd set aside for her herb garden, row by row, first the elfroot, then the felandaris then the crystal grace and so on down the line. Pontius looked out the window, but Merrill shooed him off so she would have a little time to herself to think her way around things.

She'd learned the math behind all of the spellweb-arrays. Wisdom having made her go over each one, and solve for X on every last one of them to ensure that they were sound and that Merrill understood them perfectly. The problem Merrill faced was that, while each _individual_ grid was no more magically costly than the simplest spell, the effect of having to cast each interlocked spellweb and array at nearly the same time was cumulative and it added up very quickly. It wasn't much past the fifth anchor point (and all of its attendant decision-tree spellweb arrays) that Merrill reached the upper limit of what she was able to control magically. She simply didn't have enough mana to write her will upon the world for such a powerful and complex undertaking.

_:If I were still Dalish and I wanted to accomplish such a thing, I would at least had been able to call upon the help of the other Keepers to share out the magical cost, especially if the working would be used to aid the People or restore a lost piece of Lore:_ Merrill thought.

A Keeper's Gathering to enact a magical ritual was an exceedingly rare occurrence. It only usually happened when there was some sort of piece of great lore to be restored and powerful magic was the only way to do it. Merrill had come to suspect that part of the reason why A Keeper's Gathering was a rare occurence wasn't just the fact that communications between Clans was difficult and it was hard to gather the Keepers outside of an Arlathvenn. Many of the Clan's had active and on-goin tiffs and feuds with many of the other Clans, usually over silly things, but some of the fueds could be deep-running and quite serious. A Keeper's Gathering to work a powerful magic was rare even when called by a respected member of the Dalish Community... which if she were honest with herself, Merrill had to acknowledge that she very much was not. She had the Lore of the Eluvian, but everything she had went through to attain her knowledge had cost her dearly in terms of the respect of the other Clans... or for that matter her own Clan. Outside assistance was not really an option for her, and she needed to take this first step in order to travel any further.

_:The ancient elves created systems of interconnected spellwebs that all played off each other to do the tasks they needed done, but they, too, surely must have had their limitations,:_ Merrill mused _.:I can tell **that** much just by how very carefully they set up their spell-arrays to make the maximum use out of every last bit of energy. If they had been as powerful as legend says, they would not have needed to be so careful and parsimonious with their magic.:_

"They couldn't have been all-powerful, I'm sure," she muttered to herself.

Then Merrill thought again... the ancient elvehen of Arlathan had supposedly lived forever, _and_ they'd had the gods to pray to for help, so perhaps they had been, in effect, all-powerful.

"No, if they'd been all powerful, they wouldn't have needed to bother with balancing their spellwebs so carefully to take advantage of every last bit of energy, this implies that even though they were powerful, they still had limits. I just need to find a way to work around my own limitations..."

She'd been thinking about it for a while now, and Merrill thought she might have come up with a workable solution. Lucien had said that it was possible to effectively "store" pre-written spellwebs in the matrix of crystallized substances, _if_ they had a particular core-structure. That was one reason, Wisdom had explained to her, that the eluvian had all been mirrors; the crystalline matrix of the glass held the structures of the spellwebs perfectly in place, allowing magical energy to travel along the internal bond structures without any extra magical cost on the part of the original casters.

_:And **their** spellwebs were all far more complex than the ones I will need for the grounding arrays of my spell-tree experiment,:_ Merrill thought to herself. _:If I could somehow arrange the structure of the spellwebs so that they can be pre-written into a crystalline matrix in the same way that the elves of arlathan did instead of having to write out each spellweb array simultaneously as I cast it, that will greatly the cost of casting each spellweb individually as I go.:_

It would essentially be more like letting water flow through a system of pipes to reach its destination rather than carrying to its destination bucketful by bucketful. She just needed to rearrange, and possibly re-balance the spellwebs so that they could flow through the latices of a crystal matrix... then find or create a crystal to cast the spell array's into.

_:I think I'll go speak with Wisdom about it,:_ Merrill said decisively. _:She's surely had to help with something similar before in the past._ :

Merrill left off her survey of the garden and went into the house. She knew that it was easier, in a way, for a mage to enter the Fade through meditation rather than while she was asleep. Not wanting to answer awkward questions about why she was suddenly meditating in the middle of the day to her suspicious-of-all-things-potentially-magical housemate, Merrill went into her room and sat in the lotus position on her bed. It took some time to calm herself down from her state of nervous mental excitement enough to separate her consciousness out and send it across the Veil into the Fade, but eventually Lucien's Fade-nest formed around her as she crossed over.


	17. Chapter 17

Merrill sensed more than saw the alien existence of the Fade coalesce around her as she opened her eyes. As ever that atmosphere felt thick with unexplored possibilities, though the mental construction around her granted a good deal more order than was typically seen in that realm, and that order in turn grounded her and gave her a greater sense of normalcy. Lucien's experience library was loaded with thought-books that were the record of his observations on the material world, gathered from his time as the ward-spirit of the Hearth in Fenris' Mansion. Wisdom, humorously enough, seemed to be going through them and organizing them according to some sort of Spirit-logic that only she would be aware of.

"You return, I note," Wisdom greeted her, turning her way.

Wisodom looked, as ever, like an ethereally, too-perfect version of an elvhen... its was as though someone had taken the perfect "idea" of what an elf might look like, and crafted it into physical form, but left out all of the little quirks and imperfections that would have given her face character and likeability. As such, Wisdom appeared alien and unapproachable. Merrill quickly explained to the Spirit her idea to cast pre-written spellwebs into glass or crystal like the ancients had done, and then to use those crystals to _guide_ her in the casting of her magic-circles rather than write them with magic herself simultaneously as she cast them.

"Do you think it is possible to rearrange the spellwebs so that I can write them into a crystal matrix like the ancient elves did?" Merrill asked with eager hopefulness.

"I shall investigate your query and return with the optimal answer," the Spirit replied.

Wisdom floated over to her open spell-book and cast a glowing hand over its surface. An image of the spellwebs for the grounding array appeared, hovering in pale blue-white light over the mirrored surface of her "book." Wisdom's eyes glowed silvery-white for a long moment and then the images of spellwebs rearranged themselves from a flat array of interconnected spirals branching off from anchor-points to a three-dimensional shape of regular nodes and ley-lines structured along a crystalline lattice. Wisdom shook her head and the shape of the lattice changed; cubes, triangles, three-dimensioanl hexagons flicered in and out of the air over the surface of wisdom's book. After a short time, the three dimensional shape settled into one that looked a bit like interlocked-cubes.

"Your notion is feasible, however there are factors that yet obstruct your goal," Wisdom reported to her in a curiously unemotional voice. "The crystalline matrix that will best support the most efficient reconfiguration of your arrays, the main object of which is _stability_ , belongs to the crystal known as "diamond" which I understand is rare and costly in your material world. According to my understanding of your world, the the acquisition of diamonds of the necessary purity will likely be an obstructing factor. In addition, the magical cost to pre-write spellweb-arrays of the complexity we have designed into the crystalline lattice of the diamonds is slightly over the upper limit of your mana-threshold. You shall exhaust yourself in the effort."

"What if I did one anchor-section of the grid at a time?" Merrill asked. "And then found a way to connect them all together into one array later on?"

Wisdom again glided over to her book, and the images made of light hovering over its surface changed. The original spellweb array broke itself apart into pieces, each section of interconnected spellwebs around one anchor-point changing to restructure itself into a three-dimensional crystalline structure. A board with numbers and ancient elven symbols scrolling across it appeared. Mathematical formulae configured themselves at an incredibly rapid rate as Wisdom recalculated and reconfigured the arrays based on the changes Merrill wished to make.

"There is currently no way for you to attune the anchor points to connect them to their proper arrays," Wisdom replied. "You would manage to activate two of them properly, but attempting to activate any of the spellweb arrays after that would far exceed your magical threshold. You likely would not survive the attempt."

Merrill was again struck by frustration and disappointment. She had come so far! She was within reach of her goal only to find that once again she was just not quite powerful enough for it. Still, she wasn't one to admit defeat so easily. If she had been one to easily admit defeat she would never have come so far in her personal goal of re-constructing a working eluvian by extrapolating working data from a shard of the original. She would have simply done as her Keeper tld her to, and given up, rather than persisting. A large part of her often wished that she had done so, but there was a stubborn voice inside of her that said if she had given up and did as she had been told, she's still be there repeating the same old songs and stories, learning by rote the same Lore... she would never have known anything of life outside of her Clan. She would not now be learning to take the information she had extrapolated from the eluvian shard, and apply it to new problems.

"Is there a way to perhaps store magical energy somehow to be released at need to boost my own magical reserves while I am activating the grid?" Merrill persisted stubbornly, forcing her mind out of it's well-worn rut and into new patterns.

Wisdom appeared to consider the question for a long moment.

"Yes," she replied. "The spell "durgen'sliin" or in the modern common tongue, "bloodstone." It is a combination of blood magic and glass magic wherein you can store the energy of your blood magic inside of the matrix of a crystal as you cast the spell to form the crystal. Bloodstones can be used to focus and amplify your magical power as well as act as a method to store your own personal power to be used at a later date. Be warned however there are risks inherent in creating and using them. Allowing these bloodstones out of your supervision poses a notable danger to _you._ Anyone gaining access a bloodstone you create from your blood could use it as a method to control the stone's creator."

"How many of those bloodstones would I need to boost my magic enough to power the pre-written spells within the diamonds in order to activate my grounding array the first time?" Merrill asked eagrely.

"Calculating..." Wisdom said, as more formulae flickered across the note-board hovering over her book.

A moment later a deep red crystal the color of blood from a deep wound and about the size of a robins' egg appeared hovering over Wisdom's book. Merrill braced herself as the knowledge of how a bloodstone was created was simply _transferred_ into her mind. She would need to saturate her body with magic by drawing off as much from the Fade as she could hold while simultaneously holding the quartz sand for her crystal in a liquid state. She would then need to focus in the magic in her body to a single point under her skin, powering the blood there with magic, knick the skin and let it flow into the liquid glass and then flash-crystallize the liquid while simultaneously casting a spell to fuse the two substances and stabilize the power stored within the bloodstone.

"Taking your current mana threshold into account, and your specialization in blood magic, and the amount of magical energy that would be shaved off the total cost casting the array by storing the spellwebs pre-written into anchor-stones... you would require one bloodstone of this size per anchor point on the grounding array in order to activate the grounding array."

"That's a fair amount of blood," Merrill said with a feeling of misgiving.

The inner circle had six anchor points, the second circle had nine anchor points and the outer circle had thirteen of them bringing the total to thirty anchor points, and thus thirty bloodstones. Each stone was going to be the equivalent magical cost of chain-casting her most powerful magics in a row until she was nearly unconscious from mana-drain. Not an easy task by any means, but for Merrill, it was doable. It seemed that the magics she had pursued in the past were reaping benefits for her in the present, for she was a practiced bloodmage and would have less difficulty in the gathering and harnessing her inner magic than most other mages.

_:If I'm careful, and eat and drink lots of food and water, I might be able to manage to create two bloodstones a day,:_ Merrill calculated. _:And that alone would take a little over two weeks before I was finished. That's not even counting how I'm going to find the diamonds to make the anchor-stones in the first place!:_

They were rare and very expensive. Even Merrill was aware enough to know that, even though she was wealthy due to the gold int he vault, that didn't necessarily mean that she could _spend_ the gold easily, for there would certainly be those who would question how she'd gotten enough gold to buy the diamonds in the first place, just as they had with Fenris when he had first attempted to go shopping.

"Wait, the vault!" Merrill thought with a flash of inspiration.

There were small chests with trays filled with diamonds of all different shapes and sizes. Rather than sell them, Merrill could use them for her magic!

"Wisdom, I think I have a way to do this. Please transfer the precise knowledge of the re-worked grounding array for the anchor-stones to my mind."

"As you wish," Wisdom said.

Merrill felt her mind expand distressingly outward as a great lump of data was added onto her consciousness. She thanked the Spirit and pulled her consciousness back across the Veil by the cord tethering her to her body.

"Ugh!" Merrill groaned as she woke to herself, still sitting in meditative pose on her bed.

Her head ached and pounded _abominably_ , as though someone had rammed spikes into her eyes and her ears throbbed. She waited patiently for the effects to fade, and as soon as they had done so she rose gingerly to her feet and padded out to the kitchen to help herself to a bottle of potion she'd kept on hand for her and Fenris to use. After a measured drought she felt worlds better.

"Lucien," she said, walking over to the hearth. "Please let me pass into the Vault."

The Spirit politely moved aside from the hearthstone, letting her pull out the Master Key from where it had been embedded, point down, into the stone. She unlocked the stairway then wandered down and solved the unlocking puzzle, opening the great reinforced dorway with a gentle push. The vault was it's usual gloomy self, and Merrill momentarily thought of making a spellweb captured in glass that would run a simple lighting-spell in it. She walked over to her half of the vault, utterly ignoring the boring racks of brick upon brick of solid gold and silver in the niches on top, and instead she pulled open the deep drawers that contained the locked chests. The first few drawers, she discovered, contained nothing but racks and pouches of coins.

_:I suppose I should grab one or two of these for the main safe upstairs so that we don't have to come all the way down here and deal with all of this unlocking business every time we want money for the market,:_ Merrill thought, plucking out two pouches of coins of smaller denominations from a box.

After some searching, Merrill at last located the chests that had the velvet-lined trays of gems. Fortunately for her, the person who had originally created the vault had organized his ill-gotten loot by type of gem and then further by size in carats. Merrill had to go seeking through boxes with trays of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and other lovely stones before she at last located the box with all of the diamonds in it.

She grabbed the pouches and the first box filled with diamonds and exited the vault, closing it up behind her. She left the diamonds in Lucien's care while she put the coin-pouches in the safe in the library. Re-entering the kitchen, she fetched the box of diamonds from the hearth and set it up on the large table in the kitchen so that she could peruse its contents easily.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "It comes apart!"

The box was made of trays crafted to stack perfectly atop one another, and it had the lock on the top in the middle of the chest. She discovered the reason why the lock was placed in its unusual position a moment later when she unlocked the top and discovered that the lock was the lynchpin of a device that held all of the trays together. When unlocked, the top of the box separated into quadrants and the sides of the box folded down, leaving the trays to be easily separated out. Merrill began sorting through the stones, picking out the largest of them and adding up the carats against the total volume she knew she was going to need for the set of thirty bloodstones and the anchor-stones to hold the pre-written spellwebs.

"If it's not one thing, it's another," she muttered in frustration at having hit another snag in her hoped-for march of progress.

"What's the matter missus?" Lucien asked curiously.

"I don't have enough diamonds to do both the anchor-stones and the bloodstones both," she muttered. "Once I make the anchor-stones I only have enough diamonds left over for eight bloodstones, provided, of course that I can even meld them all together properly."

"Oh... hm," Lucien said. "I'll ask Wizzy about it real quick, wait here."

The hearthfire dimmed, and Merrill realized that, with all of her toils earlier that day evening had fallen and she was quite hungry. Looking over at the stove, she was surprised to see Pontius, once again, stirring a soup pot with a basket full of rolls warming on the back of the oven. She hadn't given him any orders to cook dinner but he must have realized it was dinner time and taken it upon himself to do the task.

_:I wonder where Fenris has been all day,:_ Merrill mused to herself as she allowed Pontius to ladle out a bowl of soup for her.

He'd left after breakfast that morning, but hadn't said where he was going, and he'd been gone all day. Merrill hadn't seen any money left in the safe when she'd replenished the supply, so perhaps he'd tried shopping once again.

_:I suppose it's good he's making a habit of getting out of the house,:_ Merrill thought to herself. _:I only hope he's not doing it just so he can avoid me.:_

The thought was disheartening, but she couldn't discount it as a possibility. Fenris' dislike of her was well-established. But there were other possibilities too, so it didn't do to assume that _that_ was the reason, and it would only make her feel uncomfortable with herself. Merrill was halfway through her meal when the hearth flared a bit as Lucien returned from the other side.

"She says that diamonds are originally formed from organic material when it was transformed by heat and pressure into a diamond, and that the most common source of diamonds is usually graphite, which is pure carbon. The ancient elves of arlathan had something that translated roughly to  "cold-forges" that they had once used to make diamonds."

"What is a cold-forge?" Merrill asked in puzzlement.

It seemed like a contradiction in terms to her; forges, by their nature, were hot. How else was one to melt down the metal to form it into new shapes?

"Cold-forges were run on magic," Lucien explained. "They had spellwebs in them that used magic to break down specific substances into their component cores and then rearranged those cores to create different substances out of them."

"Like sand into glass, or crude iron into steel?" Merrill guessed.

"Widom says that they could work with more than one core-structure to make more complex materials, and that there was an entire branch of mage-craft once that did nothing but research and test cold-forge made-materials... but you'd have to ask her about that. She did say, however, that there's a simple cold-forge spellweb array to turn the abundant substance known as coal into diamonds. Wisdom also wanted me to inform you that some cold-forges were advanced enough to make diamonds that contained blank spell-web arrays of common structure forged right into them so that a mage would only have to "fill in" the function nodes to use it. She says you might use some of your raw diamonds to make a cold-forge instead, and that cold-forge could make more diamonds from coal for you to make bloodstones with."

"I see. No-one would question even an elf for buying coal," Merrill nodded. "It seems there's almost no way around it, I'll have to investigate how much it's going to cost me magically to build this cold-forge. I don't have piles of lyrium lying about to feed in the magical cost to fuel this diamond-making forge of hers."

_:I should probably move all this back to my room before Fenris sees the diamonds and asks what I would want them for.:_

He would know she was still Dalish enough that "diamonds as treasure" had no meaning for her, and that she would likely only want them if she had figured out something to do with them, and Fenris' naturally suspicious nature would immediately think magic. And he would be right.

_:I'm definitely **not** telling him about the bloodstones,:_ Merrill thought to herself as she deposited the box of diamonds in her own room. _:There's no way he'd let me make them, even if by making them I might find a way to end my use of blood magic forever... hopefully. If all goes well.:_

Fenris could be what could be politley termed as "conservative" when it came to magic even on a good day. if one were to ask him, the best sort of mage was one who never used magic at all. He had made his feelings on Merrill exploring new possibilities and trying new things with magic abundantly clear in the past and he was particularly sensitive about anything that even remotely smelled like blood magic. In short... he was not going to like it.

:I suppose what he doesn't know he can't raise a fuss about,: Merrill thought with a pang of guilt.

She felt bad for hiding her work from him, but she didn't want to hear him carp and complain at her when she was working to try to improve things. If her spell-tree harvested energy the way she had designed it to, Merrill would possibly never need to use blood-magic again, however, she was going to need to use blood magic to help her lay in the ground work and Fenris was absolutely certain to object to it. If Merrill hid her plan to make bloodstones from him, just until after her spell-tree had been planted, she could just show it to him as a fait accompli. He'd probably cmplain about her secresy on the matter but if she put it to him as her wanting to stop using blood magic, surely he wouldn't fuss over-much. Hopefully anyway. If all went well.

Even with Wisdom's assertions about the project, it still wasn't _certain_ to be a success. A lot could still go wrong, but Merrill was hopeful and she couldn't bear the thought of giving up on it now. With her diamonds tucked safely away in her little room, Merrill went back out into the kitchen to read by the light of the hearthfire, thinking that she might just take one of those diamonds she'd made and use it to set up a pre-made lighting spell instead of needing dim candles all the time.

"Witch," Fenris greeted with a stiff nod when he wandered into the kitchen from wherever it was he had spent his day.

Pontius served a bowl of soup to Fenris and brought over the basket of rolls, the honey and the fresh butter she'd bought at the market that day. Merrill joined him at the table in front of her own bowl of soup trying not feel guilty for enjoying such a fine meal while the elves at the Alienage were probably going to sleep hungry that night.

_:But... **soon** , I should have the means to aid them,:_ she thought desperately.

Two weeks seemed too long.

_:It's a pity I don't have piles of lyrium lying about... hey!:_ she thought another realization dawning on her. _:I have money now, and money can buy lots of expensive Lyrium potions.:_

With Lyrium potions to augment her mana pool, Merrill could make more bloodstones more quickly!

"You seem pleased with something," he noted. "Not more magic, I hope."

Merrill knew she was a terrible liar, so she didn't bother to deny it. Sometimes the best defense was a good offense.

"Of course it's more magic Fenris," she replied instead. "I am a mage. I just realized I could buy lyrium potions with my gold coins."

"Naturally," he said dryly. "See that you stay out of trouble, Witch. We don't need to bring those rogue Templars, or the Chantry, down on our heads."

"Surely not," Merrill agreed, remembering with a shudder the way the rogue Templars had stormed into the alienage circling about her people and searching for any hidden mages in the most ungentle ways possible.

"We should also see about going to the city office and validating the title for this house before much longer," he added, pulling her out of her slightly brooding memories of what had been a rather horrible night for her.

Merrill nodded absently in agreement, already calculating how many potions she might realistically buy. When she crossed over the the Fade that night, she'd find out the spells for making a cold-forge and then make _that_ first, then she could buy coal and let it make diamonds while she got to work on writing the anchor-stones and making bloodstones with the diamonds she already had. By the time she ran out of diamonds from her vault, she would have enough from the forge to hopefully finish the rest.

_:I'll probably be exhausted by the time this is done with,_ : she acknowledged. _:But at least I'll get to learn whether my experiment is a success.:_

She retired to bed that night and let her mind over into the Fade where Wisdom was waiting for her. They went over the spellwebs and the process for making cold-forges. Rather than having a single cold-forge that could break down multiple substances ad reform them into many different core-bond formations, Merrill chose to concentrate on just one substance and one transmutation form, hoping that a simpler spellweb would be feasible where a complicated one was not. That was when Merrill hit against yet another snag. Cold-forges in ancient arlathan had been run on magical energy. The pared-down, simplistic, cord-forge that Merrill had settled on did not require a huge amount of magical energy, comparitively speaking, as the flexible, powerful ancient forges had, she herself would be able to run a forge's array with her own magic without hitting her upper limit, but she didn't have the extra magical energy to spend on it and still accomplish everything else she wanted to do.

"Isn't there some _other_ way to run the forges?" Merrill asked plaintively. "Something that doesn't need me feeding magic into it constantly to keep it running?"

Wisdom looked back at her blankly and said

"The ancient elves of arlathan ran their cold-forges by magic tapped from their tamed ley-lines, if another way were to be found, _you_ would need to find it."

"What if we took the same idea as my plant project and harvested the sun-energy somehow?" she asked next. "And we used that as a substitute for magical energy to run the spellwebs of the cold-forge."

"There is an entry in the Lore for a photo-voltaic glass developed by Evanuris Yune," Wisdom replied. "But it was not developed beyond the proof-of-concept stage."

"So... it works, but they didn't use it?" Merrill guessed, setting aside her curiosity about the coincidence in names to the Creator June. "Why-ever not?"

"Magical energy was abundant, there was no need for such a crude and inefficient manner of powering a spellweb array to be developed any further."

"Oh," she said. "Well we _don't_ have abundant magical energy, so I think we should develop it. Let me see the working."

Wisdom's book showed her a three-dimensional rendering of the crystal-lattice and built-in spellweb array for the dark black glass that collected sun-energy. The original spell simply collected sun energy but the original designer had not bothered to build in anything beyond the spellweb that harvested the energy of the sunlight hitting its dark surface so it just collected energy until the interior spellwebs overloaded and the whole grid blew out. Merrill decided that it would be a smarter idea to make the surface of the "photo-voltaic" glass act rather more like the surface of a leaf, with veins running through it to transfer the energy collected elsewhere to be used to power the spellwebs she needed to run.

"We could modify the main spellweb array in the glass to make the collected sun-energy travel along the interior bond structure like the veins in a leaf, then it could be collected at certain points to travel down to power the cold-forges' spellwebs!" she said after a bit, sketching out the concept.

Wisdom studied her design for a moment then said

"Adjusting."

The designs of the ancient spellwebs from arlathan were modified by Merrill's designs and the whole interconnected arrays were reworked from the math-level.

"Your development is sound," Wisdom pronounced. "I will run diagnostics and testing simulations now..."

The book flickered as images danced in the air above it, flickering through various screens faster than a blink and Merrill couldn't keep track of them until they suddenly froze. Then Wisdom said

"An error has been detected. There is an over-feed of point three ley-eleissa that accumulate after every third cycle. Failure to develop a means to compensate for this charge will eventually result in overload."

A ley-eleissa was a unit of measurement for magical energy, she now knew. Merrill looked at the area she'd highlighted and ran through the math on the workboard. Sure enough, the array accumulated too much of a charge when the spellwebs cycled through their functions over time. They tried adjusting certain parameters on each of the main arrays but were unable to make an adjustment that would get rid of the charge without damaging the necessary functions.

"Why don't we just make a grid that can detect this extra charge, and shunt it to the side to be collected or maybe even grounded? It's not very big."

"Accessing lore now..." Wisdom said. "There is no record of such a development, however, three records similar to your query have been located. Displaying now."

Wisdom displayed the spellwebs from arlathan in the air over her holo-graphic projection book. Merrill looked them over and picked out the one most similar to what she had in mind, then began the tedious work of adapting the spellweb to suit her own project.

_:I now really understand what Lucien meant. Wisdom can find about anything that's already known, but she can't make something that is unknown, even if there are already things that are similar to it.:_

When Merrill had finished her work, Wisdom ran diagnostics and testing simulations on Merrill's new sun-harvesting glass and spellweb array. Merrill felt a rush of jubilation when Wisdom at last said.

"Testing and diagnostic complete, balance-stability at one hundred percent. You have created a new energy harvester capable of powering arrays up to ten ley-san'eissa in strength per cubic yero of surface area. How would you like to design your cold-forge to make optimum use of solar eissa?"

Merrill frowned a bit, uncertain. The only things she knew of that collected energy from the sun were trees and other plants, but trying to make a lot of glass panes and structure them like trees would be difficult, costly and probably not very good at actually collecting energy. Sunflowers followed the sun, but making them movable presented new problems. Likewise did having just a large glass box because the flat surfaces were likewise not very good for collecting energy.

"Er," she asked a bit cluelessly. "Maybe a box made of the glass panes?"

An image of a cube showed up in three dimensions hovering over the surface of the book, and a bright dot of light appeared beside it, causing the box to cast a shadow. The dot of light moved in an arc over the box, mimicking the su traveling over the sky.

"The shape you have chosen is an inefficient choice for harvesting sun energy in a passive manner. The surface area that recives solar energy does not do so in an effective manner," Wisdom reported.

Merrill saw what she meant. The top received energy very well at mid-day when the sun was highest, but at every other time of the day did not receive direct sunlight, also the other sides barely received any sunlight to harvest at all.

"Maybe something that mirrors the sun's arc overhead?" Merrill guessed a bit helplessly. "Maybe something like the surface of an insects eye? The pnes of glass could be flat but smaller, and arranged to make a curved surface?"

As for how she would know that the surface of an insects eye looked like... well that stemmed from one unforgettable lesson with her Keeper one afternoon when she'd been a First of only twelve years old. Spending an hour as a bee had certainly been an unusual experience!

"Accessing lore for preexisting formats... Multiple records found."

Several dome-shaped structures of different makes showed up, some were made of small triangles held together at the edges, others were formed of smaller hexagonal or octagonal shaped panels, giving the domes a more faceted shape. Merrill liked the ones with hexagon-shaped panels for the geodesic dome, they reminded her of the honeycombs in the beehive she'd looked at earlier.

"I'll take this one," Merrill said then started to manipulate the images of the cold-forge and her spellwebs and the domes, trying to mesh them all together so they'd work out well. "We can orient the harvest-points along the edges of the glass panes, then have them travel down along the net holding them up and into the grid to feed the spellwebs..."

"Placing the main collection node directly under the apex of your grid and then setting up the spellweb-arrays in a circle around it would be more efficient and waste less energy in the travel-time it takes to bring the energy to your web," Wisdom informed her a moment later, adjusting the image accordingly. "The data from the proofs of the Evanuris Yune have shown this."

"Ah, we should do that then," Merrill said accepting it, and trying not to feel nettled about someone else messing around in _her_ project.

She hit a slight snag in the next part of her work when she realized that the spellwebs cycled like a heartbeat, meaning they had points where they were active and points where they were at rest, but the flow of energy from the solar collectors was constant. This was going to mean that there was going to be unneccessary waste and build up. Merrill adjusted the timing on some of the spellwebs so that they collected the energy in their active phase when other spellwebs were at rest.

"There is still too much waste," she muttered in frustration at her inability to get the cyclic and constant modes of energy production and consumption to synchronise.

"Evanuris Solas once developed a solution for constant flow versus cyclic use that was as simple and crude as this spellweb array you are developing," Wisdom said helpfully and Merrill tried not to feel a little insulted.

"Oh! And what was this Evanuris Solas' wonderful solution then?" Merrill asked, trying to contain her irritation at the reminders that other people had already done things first and probably better than she.

"Two matched arrays working simultaneously," Wisdom replied. "While one array-set is in the active portion of its cycle, the other will be at rest. It is an extension of your previous solution."

"It would require more energy to run two arrays rather than one," Merrill muttered. "Double the surface area of solar collectors, and then add in the extra grid, synchronising their active and resting cycles to make the best use of the constant flow of energy, then."

The image enlarged and changed as Wisdom made the adjustments that Merrill had asked for and then began running a virtual test-run. She paused at sun-set.

"Problem detected," Wisdom said. "There is currently no feature to set the cold-forge in passive mode while there is no energy from the sun to run its functions. Either an alternate form of energy will be needed to run the forge through the night, or a set of sub-array functions will be needed to create a passive mode for the arrays."

Merrill nodded and created a spellweb function that would shut down the cold-forge for the night once the harvestable energy sank to a certain point so that the spellwebs wouldn't damage themselves by trying to run when there was no energy.

"Complication located," Wisdom said when she ran another diagnostic. "Alternate power setting required for occassions when harvest of sun-energy runs below optimum conditions."

"Oh," Merrill said. "You mean when it's cloudy out. It doesn't happen much here in Kirkwall, but I suppose it woud make sense to add that in just to keep things going."

She and Wisdom created a set of spellwebs that lowered the cycle-rate and allowed for a longer time to build up energy collected from the harvesters, and then she wrote a function array that stated anything falling below set parameters or energy collection would autmatically switch the cold-foge into passive mode.

Wisdom again ran her diagnostics and Merrill felt a small rush of elation when the spirit said

"Testing and diagnostics complete, no complications detected."

"It works? Yay!" she celebrated.

The resulting image displayed in the air over Wisdom's book looked like a multi-faceted, overturned glass bowl. Underneath the canopy of the bowl a line of light that flowed like a stream of water went from the apex of the dome to a small crystal in the middle of the floor around which were centered three circles. These circles were the two sets of paired intake and output spellweb arrays, with the pads that held their materials on little raised bowl-platforms in the center of them. The intake array-pads of broke apart the coal into its component cores then the energy zapped over to the output array-pads, which reassembled the cores into thier new substance. A large pile of coal would, in the process of mere moments, become a single small diamond.

"There are no existing records for this configuration of solar-energy harvesters and magical arrays," Wisdom informed her, and Merrill felt another thrill at the knowledge that, even though her invention had been based on a number of things that had already been developed, she had indeed created something new.

"Your new creation shall be added to the existing lore," Wisdom said. "Would you like to name your new development now?"

"Um?" Merrill asked, taken aback.

She'd never expected to be allowed to name her work!

"New development entitled Um added to ongoing lore records. Thank you, Nuris Merrill."

Merrill felt entirely pleased with herself. She might have cobbled together a lot of other things that already existed, but she had thought of cobbling them together and then worked out how to do it herself!

:Wisdom said it herself, I've created something new. And really, doesn't every new thing get created by something that is already known about? It can't be rediscovery of eluvian's all of the time! Besides, even if it were, Wisdom has said that we probably wouldn't have the means in modern times to make a new, fully functional eluvian anyway because we lack the magical resources to run it properly. This works! This works even without the great magical resources of arlathan.:

In fact... this might even work as an alternative to the energy created by the spell tree, maybe it won't even be neccessary for Merrill to go to all that trouble to get regular accessible power to fuel her magic...

:Nope, I'm still going to do it,: Merrill decided stubbornly. :I put all that hard work into it and I want to see my magical spell-tree with my own two eyes!"

Merrill allowed her mind to slip off back into regular dreaming, letting herself rest up for the work she planned to put in the next day.

* * *

  _ **(I sort of now picture Wisdom as Merrill's own private "Jarvis" lol)  
**_

**Here we see the beginnings of a gradual pivot. I'd originally started writing this with no real goal in mind other than it was fun to imagine Merrill using magic to clean up Fenris' sty of a mansion. But I'd always toyed with the idea of Merrill as a scholar studying and reverse-engeineering a complex and powerful piece of ancient elven technology. If you look at it as being akin to someone from the days of Babbage's Difference Engine trying to figure out and reverse-engineer a modern-day computer (where they would have the crude beginnings of the technology but certainly not know anything of its incredible complexity) the accomplishment she almost had is _really_ quite amazing.**

**If you play and Inquisition in which Merrill does not destroy her eluvian in DA II, we see her eluvian, still broken but THERE, in the Crossroads during the scene with Morrigan, which tells me that even if she was not one hundred percent able to reverse-engineer a _working_ eluvian, she was at least in part able to extrapolate the ancient magical technology, at least enough to copy-cat a terminal gateway into the Crossroads. That's not a small thing, especially considering all of the roadblocks she faced at every turn; her own magical limitations, the censure of everyone around her, the lack of reliable information sources. I kind of picture her as being like one of those "Science!" scientists in the  Agatha H: Girl Genius series, a bit flighty ad out of touch with the average person but utterly, intensely intelligent when it comes to her area of expertise.**

**Which leads me to what this story eventually found itself turning into. At the end of DA II, Merrill is about twenty five years old. That's still quite young. I do not feel that she is done finding a way to contribute meaningfully to elven society. Merrill's entire reason for doing everything she did was so that she could restore an important peice of lost heritage to her people to hopefully benefit them in some way. In my headcannon Sabrae Clan is still alive, but she's exiled from the Dalish, making the only other elves she has to turn to realistically, the city elves of the alienage. She has knowledge that she's studied and worked for, and with the help of Wisdom and Lucien she has access to greater knowledge still. It's not inconceivable that she would turn her intelligence to finding a creative new way to resurrect ancient technology in the magical climate she grew up in, now that she understands the underlying principles of how it works. It makes sense to me that she would use what she's learned to find a way to still help her people.**

**So in the future we're going to be seeing more of Merrill growing and maturing and reaching out of her little science/magic bubble and we'll be seeing more of the alienage in the future as well. So look forward to it please!**


	18. Chapter 18

She awoke feeling energized and very much anticipating the new project she had to work on. Merrill walked out into the kitchen, ready to make herself a nice big breakfast, only to discover that Pontius had apparently learned how to cook by watching her and had added the chore to his list of duties, for he had taken over the kitchen and breakfast was nearly finished.

"Oh, thank-you Pontius!" Merrill said in surprise and pleasure.

She liked cooking just fine, but she would rather spend her time working on magic. Now the chore was out of the way without her needing to feel guilty for not feeding Fenris. She sat down to a meal of egg scramble, toast, oat-porridge with currants and sweet-bark, and griddle-cakes with sweet-sap alongside morning tea. Fenris shuffled out, half-asleep and shirtless, and greeted her with a sleepy

"At least the magical abomination against the Maker knows how to prepare a breakfast at the proper hour instead of slothing away his day in bed, Witch."

"And a pleasant morning to you too, grouch," she replied in a light tone, most of her concentration was on writing out the list of supplies she intended to buy for her new cold-forge project.

She had the diamonds to create the anchor-stones for the cold-forge's internal spellwebs with, but she still required ironbark to make the skeletal frame of the structure. Ironbark was an excellent conductor of magic. She thought she'd seen a merchant at the market place selling the powdered ciranthium she needed in order to polarize the internal bond structure to make flow-paths for the energy harvesters. Of course she was going to need a lot of coal, or graphine if she could get it. There were a few other materials on the list as well she would need to acquire before she could begin working on making her modernized cold-forge.

"You've got that troublesome look in your eye," he noted.

"What look?" she asked innocently.

"The one that says that you're probably mucking about in some foul abomination against nature, _that's_ what look."

"I don't see why everyone seems to think there's something unnatural about magic," Merrill said, feeling a little exasperated by his constant asseratations that there was anything inherently wrong with magic.

"Last time I looked, magic was part of _everything_ ," she said firmly. "There are magical plants and magical animals, it affects the weather, and every single other aspect of anything that can be called "natural" and yet people _still_ call it unnatural. As far as I can tell, the only thing in the natural world that seems to try to distance itself from magic are _people_... and they're not so successful at it. Now why could that be I wonder? Oh, it _might_ be because magic is a part of everything and it's like trying to separate water from the rain!"

"The rain is water, Witch," Fenris scowled at her.

"Precisely my point!" Merrill said crisply, having had enough of being called unnatural all of the time.

Fenris scowled and grumbled and turned his attention to his food, ostentatiously ignoring her. Merrill finished off her list and her breakfast without another word to Fenris, then went to the marketplace to get the materials she was missing for her cold-forge project. Perram was not there at the marketplace to her disappointment, so the merchants probably made more from her purchases than they should have, but Merrill was too excited about her cold-forge project to waste time haggling with them. Once she brought her purchases home, Merrill had to debate with herself where the best place to set up her cold-forge would be.

_:It has to be a place that gets lots of sunlight every day, and yet, I should probably set it up in a place were Fenris isn't likely to see it, I don't want him asking any questions about it.:_

The canny mage-hater might think magic was an unnatural blight upon the world but he was surprisingly sharp about it That probably came from serving under a powerful mage himself for so long. He had a pretty good idea about what was what, and Merrill would be wise to keep that in mind. What Fenris didn't know of, he couldn't harangue her about. She decided after some consideration that the best place to put the cold-forge was the roof, as the roof got lots of sunlight every day.

_:First, I need to make the glass panes, or rather, have Lucien help me make the glass panes, for the solar harvester.:_

The Spirit might be focused more around the idea of fire rather than its reality, he could still make his hearth hot enough to melt about anything when he chose to exert his magic toward it.

"Lucien, is Fenris in the wards?" Merrill asked, creeping into the kitchen with a basket full of quartz and the ciranthium she needed to write in the harvester's flowpaths.

"He left already," Lucien said. "Wisdom already told me what you're working on, you can bet I'll be happy ta help ya missus."

"Thanks Lucien," Merrill said. "Get your blaze nice and hot, while I get the materials sorted."

While Lucien warmed up, Merrill sorted her materials into piles and went over the procedure in her mind once more. The spellweb itself wasn't at all complex, and it was the same pattern over and over to cover every inch of the glass, in addition, Merrill was already very practiced at glass-magic from her work on the eluvian, but she'd never cast this precise spell before and it didn't do to get sloppy.

"Ready whenever you are," Lucien said at last.

Merrill closed her eyes to get the spellwebs set firmly in her mind, and then poured in the materials for the first hexagonal-shaped pane onto the hearth. Lucien melted it easily and quickly. When Merrill had been working on the eluvian, and she'd needed to make glass for it, she'd had to heat up the fire in her little hearth herself to the perfect temperature then cast the complex, intricate set of spells into the molten glass while making certain the temperature remained even so that there were no flaws in her glass, then she'd had to hold the spellwebs cycling actively while the molten glass had cooled. Plus she hadn't had any real education in the theory behind the method so she'd always felt like she was casting about in the dark. In comparison to her experience in remaking an eluvian, creating the photo-voltaic glass panels (which had only one fairly simple spellweb repeating itself in exactly the same structure over and over) felt like child's play.

"There's one," Merrill said a few moments later as the glass cooled and crystallized, locking the spellwebs into place.

The pane of glass on the hearth was a little larger than her hand spread out wide. It was black and shiny, like obsidian, with a strange internal sheen when the light hit it of faint, hair-sized, silvery lines gleaming under its surface. When she looked at it from the thin side of the pane she could see tiny slivers of silvery light like sunlight catching on the edge of a mirror appear at regular intervals along the edge.

"Let's hurry and get this done before he gets back so he doesn't ask any unwanted questions about it," Merrill said, feeling confident now that she not only knew what she was doing, but was so practiced at the actual magic used for the spells that it felt as easy to her as casting a simple fire-calling spell.

Merrill added in the next batch of materials, Lucien melted it, and she shaped it and pressed in the spellwebs while it was still molten, then flash-crystallized it, setting the array into its internal matrix. She didn't wait for the hot glass to finish cooling, but used a thick leather mitt to pull it to one side, absently checking the spellweb over for flaws, then moved straight on to the next. In a bit under an hour, Merrill had finished all of the spellweb-infused, hexagonal panes of glass for the outer shell of her cold-forge.

"Thanks for your help Lucien!" she said excitedly as she packed each precious pane of glass in between a layer of cloth in a basket to tote upstairs so that she could finish building her cold-forge on the roof.

It was hot on the roof at midday, with the sun beating down. Merrill ignored the discomfort and settled into the spot she'd decided to place her cold-forge in. She used magic to form the iron-bark into the honeycomb-like skeleton that would support the glass panels of the dome. She then carefully secured the panels to the frame, making certain that the harvest points connected correctly to create proper flowpaths. It wouldn't do to have a kink in the path and the energy not be able to arrive at its destination. Once the dome (roughly the circumference of a good-sized bonfire ring and about up to her waist at the apex) was assembled Merrill tested the flow-paths for soundness, then assembled the "floor" under the canopy. It consisted of the pre-cast arrays and the four collection plates, two large flat plates of thick glas with smooth bowl-like lips to stack the coal for the input modules on and two smaller glass bowls to collect the output. The spellwebs were prewritten into a large glasspanel underneath with the source-node in the precise center to collect the energy that would travel down in a beam from the collection point at the apex of the dome. She didn't activate the spellwebs just then as she had not yet created the anchor-stones for the arrays.

"Pontius?" Merrill called climbing down the trellis along one outside wall, onto an empty balcony and let herself into the house on the second floor near the old children's room. She waited patiently and soon enough heard the clanking sound of the ambulatory suit of armor coming down the hall.

"Mum?" the metal butler asked.

"Do keep a look out for Fenris and tell me if he heads this way, I want to cast the spell arrays into the anchor stones but I absolutely cannot be interrupted once I start, or the whole thing will collapse in on itself and I will have wasted a diamond _and_ my time and magic."

"Yes mum," the butler said, taking a guard position outside of the kitchen door.

Merrill fetched the nine small diamonds she'd selected to hold the spell arrays for her cold-forge deconstruction and reassembly arrays. They were not large, at least, not as large as some of the diamonds in the box she'd seen, and they were all cut into different shapes, but when it came to the writing spellweb arrays into the interior crystaline structure of the stone, the outside shape didn't matter, only the total volume of the stone. Merrill closed her eyes and reviewed the information that Wisdom had transferred directly into her mind about the spellwebs and how to cast them into the diamond.

"Here goes," she muttered, pulling magic across the Veil and pooling it, then focusing it down hard and pushing it into the stone, feeling the neat, orderly structure of carbon-cores lined up with rigid core-bonds stronger than steel and immovable as a mountain.

Once she got a feel for the peculiar twist of magic it took to send a small trickle of power along the bond structure co-bonding her own spellwebs structure into place, writing the function-nodes of the spellweb at the carbon-core nodes of the bonds, the spellwebs she had learned and arranged came to her with shocking ease. It felt a lot like having two lines of a puzzle completed and easily being able to fill in the missing space with obvious choices of pieces held in her hand. She knew the spell, and the structure was so neat and orderly that is was not nearly as difficult as she had led herself to think. It only took one hour to fill up all of the carbon-cores and core-bonds with function-nodes and ley-lines of her spellweb. She pulled her magic out, leaving the spellweb crafted into the interior structure but inert, then happily went to work on the next.

"He comes, missus," Pontius warned her just as she'd finished off the second anchor stone.

"Thanks for the heads up," she said, putting her diamonds away. "I should really have lunch now anyway."

Pontius took her announcement as an invitation and began to putter around the kitchen. While he was assembling lunch, Merrill went out into the back garden and checked on her plots of planted herbs, reaching in and boosting their growth and magic intake with deft precision. They weren't seedlings just yet, but they were still doing well for their second day of growth and Merrill returned inside with a feeling of happy contentment she always got when working in nature.

"I have decided to purchase furnishings for this house as it looks barren," Fenris said in a firm, decided tone when he joined her for lunch.

"Oh, that's nice," Merrill said pleasantly. "What color did you decide on?"

"Red," he said proudly.

Merrill smiled in approval. The sails on the arravel of Sabrae Clan were red and she thought it was a fine color, though a trifle loud for her personal preferences. She generally tended to like green or blue.

"Instead of going to a shemlen, who will only make trouble about an elf owning so much money, I decided it safer and wiser to take my business to the dwarves. It turns out that Varric left orders with the remainder of House Tethras here in Kirkwall to offer us whatever aid we ask for of them. There will be a Dwarven merchant caravan tonight after dark who will deposit the furnishings and linens I've purchased today."

"Well, that is good!" Merrill said. "I do miss Varric. I don't why that dreadful Seeker-woman decided that he needed to be dragged off to the back end of Fereldan to sit on that mage and Templar council for that woman in the especially silly hat."

"That "woman in the especially silly hat" is the Divine Justinia," Fenris informed her in tones of superiority. "Defender of the Faith and leader of the Chantry here in the south."

"Well whatever," Merrill dismissed her and her silly hat with a wave of her hand. "Surely they didn't need our Varric more than we do here in Kirkwall?"

"Are you troubled that there is no-one to pay out bribes for criminals to leave you alone?" he inquired archly.

"Non-sense! I can take care of myself Fenris," Merrill replied, feeling a bit insulted. "I'm just worried that that awful Seeker-woman is going to accidentally-on-purpose lose him down a mountainside. She didn't seem very nice to me."

"The Dwarf will be fine," Fenris assured her. "Even if House Tethras wasn't making it clear that they're watching her like a hawk with their precious Head of their House, the Dwarf is two times as clever as she is and five times as resourceful. If he fell down a mountainside he'd come up it covered in gold and having rediscovered an ancient lost Thaig."

"I suppose you're right," Merrill said. "But still, I do worry. I hope he writes us soon."

Fenris said nothing and they finished their lunch in peace. After lunch Fenris went to the atrium to practice his swording techniques while Merrill closed herself off in her little room to finish writing in the spellwebs in her anchor-stones. It was near dinner time when she had finished with her work, and Pontius had prepared an excellent shepherds pie from the remains of lunch a few hours previous. Fenris seemed pleased with the world, or perhaps that was the large goblet of wine he drank along with it, and retreated to the upper level with the rest of the bottle after he'd eaten his fill at dinner. Knowing that he preferred to take their communal meal in silence, Merrill had brought along the book she was reading currently and had buried her nose in it while she ate, ignoring his aura of smug pleased-ness. Merrill, though anxious to get to work on finishing her cold-forge, knew that it would be wiser to wait until morning so that she would have sunlight to use to test it for soundness. Instead of fussing and fretting over it, she went to the library to study for the rest of the evening.

"I should tell Fenris to put new fluffy couches and chairs back in the library while he's at the task of buying furniture," she thought upon moving past the empty spot in the fore of the library where the small reading lounge had once been.

"The desk chair is functional, but not so comfortable for reading in," she muttered to herself as she selected out a new book to read to while away the hours before bed.

She retired that night when her eyes grew heavy from reading, telling Pontius to wake her up at dawn. She decided to let her mind and magic rest that night in preparation for labors to come and slipped into an ordinary slumber, instead of sending her consciousness across the veil to consult with Wisdom.


	19. Chapter 19

"...It works! I really works!" she exulted quietly into the morning air the next morning.

Pontius had woken her as she'd asked and Merrill had taken her box of twelve anchor stones, three for each spellweb-array, and the arrays were paired; intake for the coal and diamond for the output. There were two sets of arrays synchronized to maximize the use of the consistent magical flow from the energy-collecting panels. This meant four arrays made with three anchor stones each, which added up to twelve anchor-stones in total.

The set up had been simple, the structure of the input and output collection circles was already in place to distribute the power evenly, there were thee holders for the anchor stones built into each circle. Merrill had slotted them into their places, and once she'd rechecked that the flowpaths were running smoothly, pushed in her magic to activate the pre-written spellweb-arrays in the anchor stones, attuning each of them to their proper grid and pushing enough power into them to _kickstart_ their built-in processes.

Then she'd tested it by putting two big lumps of cheap coal on each of the intake grids and waited. It took a little while for the solar harvester to build up power right after activation so even Merrill, impatient as she felt, wasn't expecting results right away. After the sun had risen a little higher in the sky the shiny black surface of the dome took on a foggy luminescent sheen under its surface, barely visible but Merrill could sense energy beginning to build inside of it. Soon she peeked through the clear pane on the lee side of the dome and saw that one of the lumps of coal on the intake side was blurring. It looked sort of like its outline was growing hazy and a cloudy white nimbus hovered over it. The output grids each had a tiny, blurry-clear, sand shard of diamond the size of a grain of sand growing steadily larger in the center-bowl of the array-circle.

"It really works," she whispered to herself in quiet joy.

It was her creation and it _worked_! And if one invention worked, then there was a very real possibility that her _next_ invention too, might work. This might be a turning-point for her, a time when all of her hard work, her sacrifice and her faith in herself despite all the people who told her she was blind and stupid and foolish for persisting, finally bore fruit!

_:Heh, bore fruit... literally!:_ she thought, spinning around in place with quiet joy before leaving her "Um" to do it's work in peace.

Merrill quietly crept back into the house and, feeling an exhilarated burst of energy that left her feeling unable to sit still, she grabbed up the market basket and her coin purse, deciding that she wanted fruit tarts with breakfast that day. She arrived in the Hightown low-market with her basket in the time after dawn while it was still busy. Elves who were employed in all of the various Great Houses in Hightown were picking over the wares in the stalls, making thier purchases to keep their respective houses running, haggling over prices and searching out the sundries they were in need of. Merrill wended her way through the market as busy servants who needed to make their purchases quickly and get back to slaving away for a pittance at their jobs walked quickly from stall to stall, lugging their purchases with them.

"Hey!" a shemlen market-stall-owner shouted. "Theif! Catch that elf!"

Most of the other elves made a show of looking around and "being too late" to catch the offending thief, but unfortunately for the thief there were enough shemlen servants in the crowded marketplace who were interested in the potential reward for catching a thief that the young elven boy was caught and hauled over. Merrill pushed her way over to the stall and saw what she had been worried she might see. It wasn't Perram, thank the Creators, but a dirty, skinny young elf who looked like he (or possibly she) hadn't seen a good meal in a very long time was struggling to get away from her captors. Even though they were shoving the child toward the stall and he was trying hard to get away, he was also shoving as much of the stolen loaf of bread into his mouth as he could, probably figuring that if he was going to be whipped for thievery, he might as well get to eat.

"Let that boy go!" Merrill commanded the two shem who were pulling him toward the stall-owner.

The tone of authority made even the shem pause long enough to look over, and the hungry young thief, quick as a rat, twisted out of their grasp and was off like a shot, scampering up onto a rooftop and out of the market.

"Hey! You made us loose him," one of the shem complained.

Merrill was not going to apologize and she gave the shemlen, who surely had to have known that that particular stall owner was as cruel as he was copper-grasping and would have whipped the boy beyond a reasonable measure, a narrow look.

"Bet she was in league wiv him," the other shem said. "Pro'bly distracted us sos 'e cud git away."

"Hardly," Merrill said ostentatiously turning to the bread vendor, who in no-way deserved it and said

"I shall pay for the boy's bread if you will agree to overlook it."

The merchant named a price that was three times what the tiny loaf would have cost and Merrill glared at him as she told over the coin. They both knew she was bribing him to keep quiet on the matter of the bread theif. Another movement caught her eye, and she saw several other small, skinny limbs weaving through the busy marketplace.

"I'll also take the rest of that lot of rye-bread, for the correct price. You don't need a bribe for that."

The greedy bread-vendor haggled to raise the price so Merrill walked away and a nearby fruit merchant got her coin instead. She took a basketful of fruit that had been passed over as misshapen, bruised or too overripe to grace the tables of the masters of the elven servants who frequented the markets. Merrill caught they eye of the children hiding their beautiful elven ears and held out the fruit, beckoning it over to a nearby empty spot in the shade. One elven child daringly came close for the offered fruit.

"Go and bring your friends," Merrill instructed the child, gesturing to the over-ful basket of fruit she'd laid out temptingly beside her. "I've plenty to go around, and I'm sure you all must be hungry."

"It ent poison is it?" the young elf asked, looking at the offering with a mixture of wariness and pure hunger.

"Of course not, why would you think so?" Merrill asked, suspecting she already knew the answer.

"You are a witch, everyone says so," the child answered honestly. "Got thrown out o' the Alienge cuz you set those Templars on fire. I sure would've liked to seen that."

"You don't like Templars?" Merrill asked.

"They took my older brother away, an' he fed us."

"Where are your parents?" Merrill asked, suspecting she already knew.

"Dead," the child said with no more emotion than someone discussing the weather. "Mom took sick after having Laffie, and Da got a 'fected when his leg was crushed by a cart."

"I see," Merrill said. "It's not poison, and the magic I use is more than it seems on the surface. I don't use my magic to hurt people unless I see that they are hurting other people. I lit those Templars on fire because they were going to hurt someone in the Alieange without cause to do so. I protect my own, as I was raised to, and if I use magic to do so then it is nothing more than me using every arrow in my quiver. You would not expect a swordsman to not use his sword to defend his home and family would you?"

"I s'pose not," the child said clearly deciding her argument was sensible enough that she could go ahead and eat the apple.

"There you go then," Merrill said firmly.

"You have those funny marks on your face. Philomela says you're called a Dalish, and that the Dalish are all heathens. I dunno what that means but it sounds exciting."

"These marks are called Valla'sliin," Merrill explained patiently, wondering if she was going to spend the rest of her life in the city explaining what it meant to be Dalish.

She was just going to skip the part about blood-writing as she'd learned the hard way that the blood part tended to make city elves nervous.

"And we worship proper elven gods, who existed before the Maker-faith was ever spread by that Andraste woman."

"The Chantry says that heathens must either convert or be burned."

"What is it with your faith and burning people I wonder," Merrill wondered dryly. "And what do you think of it?"

"Can you turn people into toads?" the child asked, clearly not interested in a discussion about ethics and religion.

"That's transformation magic," Merrill replied. "Not a branch of magic I've spent any time studying I'm afraid. What else does the Chantry say? Is it true that they've been turning elves away from their doors and not feeding them?"

"Yeah," the girl said, finishing off her apple, core, seeds and all and looking for another.

Other elven children had apparently been waiting for the girl to eat the fruit and see if she was poisoned by it, for a few minutes after the girl had finished her first fruit, children drifted near in ones and twos, melting out of the crowd in the same way that Dalish Hunters could fade in from out of the woods, and coming forward with hungry eyes and arms outstretched. Merrill handed out one piece of fruit to every child, making certain that there was no fighting and everyone got a share. Deep within, her Keeper instincts awoke and reared up.

"You all look very hungry," she noted, resting the urge to bring them all home with her and start feeding them properly like a Keeper should. "Why does the Chantry not feed you if it is supposed to be their job?"

"They say," one small, skinny boy piped up. "That there's a greater need elsewhere, and that elves should take care of elven affairs since we have a Alienage all to ourselves by the grace of the Chantry. An' that we should all be bowing our heads in gratitude and worship to the Chantry for giving us the Alienage, not asking for handouts."

Merrill frowned. That did not sound like something a Keeper should be saying to thier Clan. She should find out a little more.

"How is the Alienage doing?" she asked next. "They told me to leave, so I wouldn't know. Are your homes all fixed?"

Tiny heads with stringy, dirty, knotted hair all shook in negation.

"No," some of them said.

"You sleep in the open?" Merrill asked next, gently as she handed out more fruit.

"It's dry enough," one boy said. "The Inner Warrens are crumbling so the elders who are left all tell us to stay away from it. The fire that burned down the vhenandhal took out all of the fishing boats we had in the harbor, but sometimes we get in relatives from the Crags with fish they can't sell."

The Crags were part of the reason why the Wounded Coast was called the Wounded Coast. They were large, tall, finger-shaped islets of stone that jutted up sharply from the water, making safe navigation a difficult proposition unless a sailor was quite skilled. Some of them were large enough to support tiny communities of subsistence fishermen, who lived outside the city law and did not pay tax. In violent weather, it was quite common for boats to be dashed against the rocks and destroyed. The Alienage-side of the Kirkwall coast had all of the crags on it, thus it was rare for a ship to even attempt to land in their harbor. The harbor controlled by the shemlen on the other side of the city was where all of the merchant business happened because it was enclosed, and crag-free, making it a much safer proposition to land ships in.

"That's not too often that they kin spare the food, though," one boy said wistfully.

"They gotta make a living too," another said with a stoic shrug.

"What about fixing up your homes?" Merrill pursued, trying to steer the conversation away from food and back to information.

"We can't rebuild, not really," one girl said. "Gran-gran says that the Inner Warrens were carved out by our great-ancestors who were slaves before the city got free from Tevinter. There's nothing left ta carve into, she said, and the Warrens are all falling in."

"What about building on top of them?" Merrill asked sensibly.

"Nah," one boy said flatly. "Ya need wood ta build if ya can't build with stone. There's not much wood in Kirkwall unless you go to the Yard--"

"The shipyard," another elven boy piped up to clarify.

"An' all o' that wood is ta make ships," the first boy continued.

"Why not go into the nearby forests and get the wood you need to rebuild with?" Merrill asked sensibly.

"Only if we wanted ta be arrested," One child said with fearful eyes.

Another child explained

"There's this noble House in Hightown what has all of the right to cut down trees nearby and sell the wood to make ships," the girl said in a slightly lecturing tone. "They take a skim off the top for the trees they sell and the city gets some of that money. Wood's expensive because merchants need it to make ships fer trade so they keep a tight grasp on it. The Merchant's wealthy enough to afford it all have first dibs."

In other words, the elves would not be seeing any of that expensive wood in Kirkwall any time soon and if they tried to log it for themselves the Noble House would imprison them for it.

"Hahren says that magic can do a lot of things besides turn people to frogs and light people on fire," one particularly bright looking young girl said. "Can you use magic ta give us our homes back?"

"That's something I'm certainly planning on looking into," Merrill promised them. "When you return to the Alienage and speak with your Hahren, tell them this from Merrill. I'm working hard on finding something that can work for the Alienage and when I come back it won't be with empty words or empty hands."

"Will you come back here tomorrow?" one boy asked. "And bring more food?"

"Yes," Merrill said with a smile.

If she hadn't been resolved before, she certainly was now. She was _going_ to think of a solution, a way to shelter the elves of the Alienage.

_:But it'll probably take more magic and more resources than I have currently,:_ Merrill acknowledged as she let herself into the kitchen door to find that Pontius was finishing breakfast and Fenris was already eating without her.

The market basket filled with mis-shapen fruit told Fenris where she had been without her needing to say a word. Merrill grabbed a few rolls and a lump of soft cheese and departed for the library after exchanging a cursory greeting with her housemate who left the kitchen soon after to go out and do whatever it was that he'd found to fill his days with. When Merrill took her snack and let herself into the library, she was surprised to discover that the little lounge-area in the very fore-center of the room, was now occupied once again with furniture. She had turned the previous set of furnishings to ash for the upholstery and cushions had been occupied by wildlife that had used it to do their business, they had stank and were utterly unsalvagable so Merrill had simply destroyed them.

_:Fenris must have gotten new ones when he paid for furnishings from the Dwarves earlier,:_ Merrill thought, admiring the plush, comfortable-looking arrangement of leather chairs, footstools, a long couch, a Tevinter-style chaise, and several groupings of small tables for Merrill to conveniently stack books upon. She walked right past them however and made her way to the shelf of books containing information about architecture. She could start there, but she had a feeling in her gut that she wouldn't find the sorts of answers she was looking for.

_:If it's going to be an Alienage for the elves, then I'd like to see it be a bit more **elven**. There must be many lost techniques and technologies that were used in Arlathan that could be adjusted and brought to new life here! I have so many questions,_ : Merrill thought to herself. _:If only there were an easier way to ask Wisdom about them instead of me always having to go to all of the trouble to send my consciousness past the Veil and into the Fade. I wish she could loan me that book of hers...:_

Merrill paused, a glimmer of an idea occurring to her.

She'd long admired Wisdom's book, which not only could display multiple images above it in a spectral light as though they were real objects, but Merrill got an odd feeling that Wisdom's book was somehow connected, eluvian-like, to a larger pool of knowledge somewhere else in the vast realm of the Fade.

_:I wonder...:_ Merrill thought to herself, excitement growing a little bit. _:I wonder if there might be a way to make an eluvian that communicates with Wisdom's book, then I could ask her questions, maybe by writing it in, and she could answer me without needing to go to all of the great trouble of sending my mind across the Veil.:_

The capabilities of a full eluvian, where the entirety of of a single person was transported across space-time instantaneously and then reassembled on the other side of a different eluvian, was very likely impossible for her to replicate, but a lesser kind of eluvian, with a small, concentrated focus on only a few functions should be quite feasible.

_:The answer is no unless I ask,:_ Merrill said encouragingly to herself.

Despite Wisdm's apparent pleasure in the new developments that Merrill made when she took former knowledge from Aralthan and expanded on it to bring it into functionality in the modern era, Merrill always felt a bit like she was being an imposition asking the Spirit so many questions all of the time. Still...

Merrill walked back to the new set of leather lounge furniture and relaxed into the chaise, adeptly sending her mind into the not-quite-sleeping, not-quite-waking state f Fade-meditation. In moments she found herself inside of Lucien's ward-house on the other side of the Fade. Merrill walked quickly to the library where Wisdom preferred to keep herself.

"Hello, Wisdom," Merrill greeted the ethereal elvish-looking spirit with a polite bow.

"A greeting to you, Merrill," wisdom replied. "You have a query?"

"It's been said that a Spirit cannot manifest on the other side of the Veil without inhabiting a host," Merrill said as a prelude to building up to her real question. "And I had a friend who did that, and it turned out poorly for the Spirit and my friend."

"The rule, while not always universal in this modern era, is a generally sensible principle to keep," Wisdom agreed. "The attempt to mesh two disparate entities into one without sensible precautions will eventually lead to the both of them becoming something other than who and what they are. It would be a wise precaution to _not_ attempt it."

"Well what about... um... communication?" Merrill hazarded, having a bit of a hard time putting her thoughts into words.

"What have you in mind, Merrill?" Wisdom inquired.

"Something like an eluvian, only it's not nearly as complex as a regular one. An eluvian that acts like your book, Wisdom. I was thinking that I could use it to connect to your book, maybe, and communicate with you and ask you questions without always having to come all the way over here on the other side of the Veil, because its very tiring, and not very..?"

"Not an efficient use of time," Wisdom finished for her. "In Arlathan, it was fairly common to use a modified, portable sort of eluvian in the manner it seems you envision. This device was used in a variety of ways; it was an interface to interact with information and manipulate data, an information storage and retrieval device, a communications device and general-work device," Wisdom told her.

While she had been listing off the functions of the ancient elvhen Book of Wonders, she had also showed Merrill the different types of interfaces and spellwebs that were used in the lesser-eluvian she spoke of. Merrill found that she _very_ much wanted the ancient Arlathan Book of Wonders that did so many different, useful things.

The Spirit appeared to think the matter over for a long time.

"Given your current resources, what you ask is not _entirely_ impossible, though it would seem that the functions will be somewhat more limited than they were in arlathan, mostly because of your lack of magical resources."

"Yes!" Merrill celebrated, excited by the prospect of having her own magical eluvian-book that could access Wisdom's apparently near-limitless knowledge from Arlathan.

"However," Wisdom added in a cautionary tone. "The spellwebs for such a project, while they were once common, and commonly used, in Arlathan, are no longer viable in the current magical climate of this modern era. They would all need to be re-examined, re-calculated, revised and rewritten to adapt to the modern magical climate before your proposal could come into fruition."

"But, it _is_ possible?" Merrill said.

"The communications, display and interface functions that you propose, as well as the fact that it would serve merely as an ephemeral connection for the exchange of information, and not as a physical gateway to transport matter, _are_ feasible because they require far less in the way of energy than a pure eluvian would. In fact, in arlathan, private libraries were often linked to large, public information sources through specially-made eluvian of lesser function such as you've described to me."

Merrill's heart pounded and she felt all aflutter, even there in the Fade, at the idea of having limitless stores of knowledge at her fingertips at all times!

"If only I'd found this sooner!" she lamented even despite her excitement.

"Shall we begin your proposed project?" Wisdom asked.

"Sure, soonest started is soonest done as my Keeper would say," Merrill replied.

"Beginning new write-file now, shall it be added to the main knowledge-hub?"

"Um... I suppose so?" Merrill hazarded.

So far as she knew, Wisdom and other Spirits like her were the only one's with access to this "knowledge-hub" whatever it was, and since Spirits didn't perform magic in the conventional sense, she had no idea what use it might be to them. Still, the Keeper in her said that whatever restoration she had managed to adapt or create should be shared, so long as it was not with the shem. The shem had no business learning of elven magics when they so consistently and determinedly worked to erase and destroy every last bit of elven culture and knowledge.

"Oh, except that if any shem, er that is, any human, tries to access it, I do not wish it to happen. Keep this knowledge among the elves where it belongs."

"Adding in security protocol condition now," Wisdom replied. "Recalling data concerning the--"

Wisdom said a long string of words in ancient elven that Merrill, for all that she had been a scholarly First in her Clan, did not know and had never heard before. She would have interrupted to ask Wisdom for a translation of what she had said in elven so that she could learn new vocabulary in the lost language, but three-dimensional images of what Merrill called spellwebs appeared hovering in three-dimensional imagery over the surface of Wisdom's book.

"One might start by measuring the approximate density of the current Veil in order to compile data to make the necessary revisions to the eishianal."

"I do not know what that word means," Merrill said. "And how are were to measure the density of the Veil?"

It seemed an incredibly daunting, if not impossible, task to her.

"Accessing lei-lanin now..." Wisdom replied.

Another ephemeral work-board appeared and then quickly filled up with incomprehensible characters in ancient vallan that Merrill wished badly to study, but the board began scrolling upward too fast for her to keep track of.

"What are you doing?" Merrill demanded, now starting to feel quite irritated at being left out.

"In order to make the necessary adjustments to rewrite the "spellwebs" as you call them (though the term, while meritorious, is not entirely accurate) new, updated data is required. I yet have access to input devices scattered along the ancient ley-lines, few though they are, that are capable of measuring the Veil."

"Oh... is that what all of these symbols are?" Merrill asked. "Hard as we have tried, my people do not retain most of the vallan used by the elves of Aralthan."

"I shall translate the information into modern numbers for your use," Wisdom replied.

The work-board suddenly started scrolling with complex mathematical formulae as Merrill had outlined it for the Spirit when they had first begun to learn together, giving them a common "language" to communicate with.

_:That's the nice thing about numbers,:_ Merrill mused to herself while Wisdom complied her data in order to begin the work. _:There's really only one right answer. One plus one is always two, not three or seven or ten. The spellwebs might be almost ridiculously complex, but in the end they're still numbers, and once you understand what you're supposed to do with them, the rest tends to fall into place with a little practice.:_

Function nodes from the ancient spellwebs lit up at the same time as the formulae describing them on the extra work-board did.

"Error detected, unable to proceed," Wisdom replied presently.

"What's wrong?" Merrill asked.

"Array unable to process further functions," Wisdom replied, highlighting and enlarging the trouble spot for Merrill to investigate and presumably solve.

"It sounds like you don't know what wrong and don't know how to fix it," Merrill muttered. "Alright, let's have a look then."

Merrill dove in, breaking apart the spellweb-array into its individual spellwebs just as she had so recently learned to do, examined its functions via the formula- covered workboard, skimming through the long strings of encoded spellware. When she had been studying the eluvain, she'd "searched" through the spellwebs she'd recreated into physical being in her own work by wending her magic along the spellwebs and writing out the functions by hand on a scroll or notebook then parsing them out mathematically by hand. Wisdom's work-board was a vast improvement (and even that was an understatement!).

"Huh... this sure didn't get far before the wobble destroyed its Functions," Merrill mused to herself.

Wobble was the term Merrill used for an imbalance in the way the magical energy was cycled through the spellwebs and arrays. A minor imbalance might not even show itself in the first cycle, but the more a times power was cycled through the array, the greater the "wobble" would tend to grow until it usually eventually built up too great magical charge or too small a magical charge and either blew out the spellweb array or the energy petered out, unable to travel through the webs once its power was used up on activating the spellweb functions. Perfect balance of energy in a spellweb was absolutely paramount.

"In my experience, that usually means that there's not enough power going into your array to activate the spellweb functions," Merrill said, zooming in on the Source Node, which was the place in the center of the spellweb spiral that fed power into the string of function nodes that told the magical energy what to do in very precise, very controlled ways.

The Source Node in the spellweb-array that was giving Wisdom so much trouble was indeed not pulling in enough energy to power the array, but Source Node-functions were possibly the most important part of the array and the most difficult. They acted as gateways for the precise, correct amount of power to be pulled into the spellweb every time it cycled through its functions. If a single mistake was made in that command-code then the spellweb would destroy itself sooner or later. Not only did a Source Node draw off magical energy to power the function nodes on its string, but they were more often combined with gate-nodes, which (among other things) read sequences of commands from previously activated decision-trees and activated certain nodes in sequence according to the command codes, which in turn also modified how much energy it was to pull into its spellweb.

Merrill spent what felt like hours wading through the formulae of the spellweb array and at last arrived at a conclusion.

"It looks to me," she said to Wisdom. "That the ancients were a little _too_ good at their work."

"Elaborate," Wisdom replied.

"All of their spellweb-arrays were stacked on top of each other, and their function node commands were all interdependent on each other. I guess I could say that the smooth way these spellwebs all work is because of the flexibility in them where each spellweb sort of reforms the way it works based on decisions that came before that point. The complexity of the system was what made so adaptable but it's become a liability in the modern magical environment."

"Proposition unclear," Wisdom said.

"In ancient arlathan, it looks like magic was as thick as peasoup everywhere, like everyone lived in a permanent senuthenera, or a place where the Veil is thin. So the functions on the flexible spellwebs that simply pull in more ambient magic to keep the energy flowing are not possible here where the Veil is too thick to pull in magic easily."

"Obstruction identified," Wisdom replied in a confirming tone. "Alternate solution required."

"What about other forms of energy?" Merrill inquired. "Like I made for that diamond forge. We could harvest sunlight, or use some sort of mechanical device to create kinetic energy which could be converted to magical energy easily enough. Or better yet, some kind of energy-sink or a kind of refillable reservoir that can store magical energy away to be accessed later on at need, kind of like the bloodstones, only... please no blood magic, it makes people nervous."

Not shy about recreating new things from past ideas, Merrill asked Wisdom to search her "knowledge-hub" archives for past developments that would fit those parameters. Now that Wisdom had defined parameters to work with, she had no difficulties in accessing the stored knowledge from her wisdom-book. A rather long and interesting list of alternate options were presented to Merrill for her to weed through and she dove into the work with delight.

Many of the solutions were theoretical rather than practical, as in Arlathan they had simply not been needed. Most of them were written by the unknown "Evanuris Solas" who had seemed to posses a strange fascination with the Veil (as it had existed then) and the Fade (also, as it had existed then). But even his theoretical ideas were wildly impractical, relying on an _unbelievable_ amount of power being readily available rather than seeking to do more with less as Merrill tended to use the spellwebs of Arlathan to do.

"It looks like this project is not going to solve itself overnight," Merrill concluded upon wading through a portion of her long reading list. "But when it comes to making myself a functioning eluvian, even a _quasi_ -eluvian, I suppose a little more patience won't kill me. We'll start the research in earnest tomorrow tomorrow, after I've had a good nights rest, in the meantime, please organize the list of research from Arlathan you've provided me by these parameters."

Merrill wrte a number of conditions on the workboard for Wisdom to go through.

"One looks forward to future developments," Wisdom replied, seeing Merrill safely back to her body in the library.

Hardly done with the day, Merrill spent the rest of her late afternoon and evening with her empty notebooks, jotting down all of the new information that Wisdom had given her, and beginning the preliminary work of trying to piece the great puzzle together from shards and other apparently useless things.

"Persistence," she murmured to herself.

Eventually, Pontius came along and all but carried her away from her desk piled with her notes and notebooks and sat her down to eat dinner.

"The furniture you placed in the library is very comfortable," Merrill greeted Fenris when he came wandering into the kitchen for dinner. "Thank you for giving me a nice place to do my reading."

"I did not place it there for _you_ ," he replied with his customary bluntness. "I was merely furnishing the entire place, and wished to make a complete job of it."

"Oh, I see," she said simply. "Well either way, it's very nice."

"Hmph," Fenris grunted noncommittally. "I have heard around the market that you have taken to feeding orphans."

So, her morning adventures had gotten back to him then.

"Yes," she said firmly, making eye contact with him and daring him to try to stop her from doing her Keeper's duty to her people. "And I intend to go on feeding them. I also intend to start educating them, since the Chantry does not seem to feel the need to do the job its _supposed_ to have been created for where elven children are concerned."

Fenris was quiet for a long moment then quietly said

"Be cautious, Witch."

Merrill frowned at him. Fenris added

"The Chantry as it exists now in Kirkwall is..." he sighed, looking troubled. "It draws power not by bringing strength and solidarity to every member of the faithful, but by pandering to the darker natures of those who are already powerful and those who gain power by taking rightful equality away from others. It does not seek to sing, it seeks to silence. And the ones who shout loudest now only do so to drown out the voices of those who would otherwise seek its protection."

Merrill looked at him in perplexity.

"In short, watch that woman who calls herself Mother Beneficence, the lay-sister Jayelle. She has gone into the halls of the powerful and promised to act as a bridge between the mighty and the poor, who are often divided. What she does not mention is that this bridge she speaks of to the poor only extends to a very limited section of the total poor, and the elves are most certainly excluded from this outreach. In fact, she may turn the poor against the poor. The solidarity she offers is not based on shared faith, but upon the length of ones ears, it seems."

Merrill nodded in understanding. She didn't know why Fenris seemed so upset about it, the shemlen turning on and oppressing and attacking her people was nothing new to _her_. It was why Hunters protected the Clan and did not let the shem near the camp. That the Chantry wished to use its power against her people was not news to her, they had done so since the before the fall of the Dales and it was why the Dalish existed at all. She certainly had taken note of Sister Jayelle, and she would watch her carefully in the future.

"Thank-you, Fenris, for the warning," Merrill said politely, as her own Keeper would have done to a hahren of the Clan who had shared insight and council with her. "I will certainly take your words under advisement. I will feed and educate the young, but, I do not believe that I shall do so in the marketplace where all can see and object to it. The city-elves will not open the gates of the Alienage for me yet, but I'm sure I can come up with a solution."

Silently she added to herself

_:I'm sure Hawke wouldn't mind me borrowing the main floor room of his house for a few hours.:_

Later that evening, after Fenris had went to sleep, Merrill snuck up to her coal-to-diamonds cold-forge on the top of the roof to see the results of the days work. The energy-collecting dome powering the spellwebs beneath was currently in passive mode as there was no sun in the sky to harvest energy from. Merrill opened a hinge on one of the hexagonal panels and pulled out the contents on the "output" trays. From the piles of coal that had been fed into the input trays there had formed two diamonds roughly the size of a robins egg. Their rough sides glittered softly in the moonlight with unspoken promise for her upcoming project.

First she would fill these bloodstones and get the grounding spellweb arrays for her spell-tree experiment activated. Then she would grow the spell-tree and harvest its magical energy. Then... she would save her people.

"Perseverance," she whispered to herself.


	20. Chapter 20

The two weeks following her successful development of a working cold-forge based on ancient elven magical technology were very busy for Merrill. She woke at dawn every morning and spent an hour in the mansion's back garden working on her medicinal plants (and covertly on the spellweb array for the spell-tree she intended to plant once she had the made the preparations she needed in order to make it a success). Over the course of that time, her herbs started to grow noticeably taller and stronger for being boosted a little bit by her nature magic every day. Pontius continued to make breakfast for her and for Fenris every morning, and after she had eaten, merrill and the automaton baked large batches of round loaves of bread to feed her reluctant scholars. In addition to the promise of a small loaf of bread every day for coming to lessons, Merrill also slipped over to the marketplace to buy whatever leftover produce could be gotten after the morning rush. After that, she went to Hawke's mansion (which had _technically_ been confiscated by the State of Kirkwall, but since there was no-one using it, she figured that it was as good a place as any to get away with something). Merrill spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon educating any elven children she could get to come to her. Her Keeper had raised Merrill to educate her Clan and so that was what she was going to do.

Getting the children to come to her was harder than she had thought it would be, at first. The bribe of food got some of them through the door, but when they learned that they would be expected to learn to do study-work, a large number of them dismissed the idea as useless to them. They took their food and scampered off. It was disheartening to her to see so many of her people give up on themselves by thinking that an education would never do them any good and that they were destined for poverty and poorly-paid work. Being stubborn, Merrill refused to give in at the first difficulty, and she quickly learned to lure her reluctant students into the schoolroom with the bread, _then_ she promised that any who remained behind and worked hard at their studies would earn additional rewards. Fruits, candies and sweetrolls, as well as honeyed-teas and sweet fruit juices, were temptation enough to get the majority of her students  to remain for the lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic... but there was no reward she could offer them that was going to interest the older, more recalcitrant to stay for her lessons in elven history.

 _:I can see about that later,:_ she promised herself after the first week, when she decided to simply stick to the basics to start with and worry about additional learning later, once she'd gotten her children accustomed to their lessons.

She was pleased each late morning to see her collection of dirty, pointy-eared children growing little by little. She knew that a number of these same children also did whatever work they could find around the city that might possibly give them enough coin to fill their aching bellies. They cleaned chimneys or pulled various carts (most of them entirely too large for underfed children their size) they took in washing from the wealthy or middling-wealthy, they served miserly shem for a pittance of a wage. They did the dirty, hard, thankless work of the city and many, she knew, died of it from poor conditions they were forced to endure to do what work they could get to feed their bellies.

 _:I swear upon the bones of my ancestors,:_ Merrill thought with quiet fire one day after she'd used what little healing magic she had to cleanse the lungs of one poor boy from coal dust that had accumulated in him from his work as a chimney sweep. _:I am **going** to find a way to make things better. If I have to resurrect Arlathan itself, I will make a future where these children are not poor, starving, overworked and taken advantage of!:_

Overthrowing the shem was probably out of the question. They had institutions in place to keep the powerful in power, but by her ancestors, Merrill was _going_ to find a way to build something that would protect the powerless, something to serve as a shelter and a bulwark against those powerful institutions that preyed upon the weak and defenseless, that squeezed every last drop from them and discarded the used husks like they were trash. She'd find a way to protect her people, to feed them and educate them and care for them as a Keeper must.

 _:And to do that,:_ she knew. _:I must grow my knowledge.:_

The evenings she went back to Fenris' mansion and ate the dinner that Pontius made for her (and for Fenris who might or might not show up). Then she went to her room or to the library and threw her consciousness across the Veil and worked with Wisdom on their eluvian-book spellweb project. The work she accomplished there with figuring out a way to update the processes that made the wonders of ancient arlathan possible, would, she hoped, become that all important first stepping stone to finding a way to adapt the ancient wonders to modern times. It was not, however, a process that was done smoothly or easily. There was a great deal that was different between then and now, apparently, and Merrill had to solve for those differences one by one. If she were not already accustomed to monumental odds being stacked against her, Merrill would have been very frustrated with the way her project seemed to hit upon two set-backs for every problem she solved.

Merrill did not give up or loose hope. She figuratively rolled up her sleeves and threw herself at the problems she faced. If one way did not work she tried another, and another, and she kept working at it until she'd solved it. Merrill would have loved to be able to claim that she was the sort of magical genius that was able to come up with every solution straight out of her own mind, but the truth was that most of her solutions were derived from researches into other works that other people (not all of them elves) had already come up with that she simply adapted and re-purposed to fit her own particular needs.  She had Wisdom comb through the archives available to her for researches, theories or writings that might offer a solution to the problem she faced. She used her _imagination_. It didn't always work, but it more often than not her findings gave her a new tool or inspiration that wound up helping her further down the line.

Time passed differently within the Fade than in normal reality. What was only an hour or two in the material world could be as much as nearly a full day on the other side of the Veil, so Merrill had plenty of room to work as hard as she could. When she had solved enough to consider herself sufficiently advanced for the day, Merrill departed to the real world feeling exhausted, but satisfied that her work was proceeding apace.

As the last act of the day, each day Merrill collected her two diamonds from the cold-forge and took one of them back to her room with her. She waited until she was certain that Fenris was asleep (so that he could not object to her work out of ignorance) and then Merrill sealed off her room and set up the complicated, magically powerful ritual that powered up a bloodstone.

She didn't use much in the way of magic in the course of a day anymore, certainly not in the way she had done when she had been working on the eluvian, or asked to chain-cast powerful magic spells when traveling with Hawke. As such, Merrill found that her magical reserves were brimming with unused mana. In fact, the making of bloodstones seemed to sort of relieve a vague pressure that had come, unnoticed, from her not using her magic as much as she had built up herself to do.

When all was said and done, Merrill was a powerful mage and she was unwilling to let her magical muscles atrophy. Every night, it felt strangely good to throw wide her inner magical gateways and gather magic into her san'shi'an saturating her blood and body with powerful magic by letting it flow into her. She centered and concentrated this magic, tying it into her blood which only heightened its already great power, then she pushed the magic into the blank diamond, using a magical ritual to bond its carbon into the carbon of the stone. The strength of the magical power leaking off from it felt, to her magical senses, rather a bit like standing next to a blazing bonfire. She couldn't help but feel excited to think that the bloodstone she made each night would soon, hopefully let her re-write the way she could perform magic.

* * *

"Oh!" Merrill blinked in surprise one evening on the second day of her third week bribing children into getting an education.

In the doorway of Hawke's Mansion stood three people. One of them was familiar to her. Aveline (hopefully not in her capacity as Guard-Captain coming to arrest Merrill for the unauthorized use of a residence that had been confiscated by the State) was looking into the open foyer that Merrill had converted into a simple, elven schoolroom. Flat cushions lay on the floor in front of short lap-desks with tablets of slate and relatively cheap lumps of chalk, all arranged to face a larger tablet of slate set up on an artists easel that Merrill had found and re-purposed. Merrill used the larger slate board to show her students what they would learn and they copied it down on their own slates to practice their writing and figures. Standing slightly behind the imposing guardswoman were two elven women. One of them was a hahren of the Alienage; a feisty, blunt, curmudgeonly elf named Philomela, renowned for being pointy and sharp and always throwing things at people. The other was Saena, a matronly sort of woman with a nurturing mien to her, who had been one of the few to welcome Merrill into the Alienage despite the fact that she was a known bloodmage.

"Andaran atish'an," Merrill said nervously. "You're not here to arrest me are you Aveline?"

Aveline sighed.

"No, Merrill," she said. "Just here to check and make sure that you're doing well. That Chantry sister has been complaining that you've stolen her students and are teaching them magic and blasphemy."

"I don't see why _she_ is complaining," Merrill replied with an edge of irritation in her voice. "A lot of _nerve_ if you ask me. She wouldn't have anything to complain about if she would take them in and teach them their lessons properly, but she's been turning them away along with all the other elves of the Alienage."

Aveline frowned unhappily.

"The Chantry isn't supposed to regard the race of their followers in the fulfillment of their duties, but unfortunately there's nothing I can do about it when they decide to do so. I'm glad to see you've decided to do something positive with your talent instead of mess around with that creepy mirror."

Merrill kept carefully quiet about her eluvian-book project she was working in in the Fade with Wisdom.

"We of the Alienage have also been keeping tabs on your work, child," Philomela said bluntly, striding forward and looking her directly in the eye with an almost confrontational frankness. "You're more effective in getting these littles to their lessons than the last few sods who tried to do it were. You're so meek and silly I'd honestly never suspected you had it in you to run herd on our rambunctious little ones. Most of those who tried before you came away with headaches and the sorrow of failure. Our children are very much of a mind to do as they want to instead of settling in like proper, obedient children."

"Um? I'm not sure what you mean?" Merrill said hesitantly.

"What she means," said Saena with a gentle, maternal smile. "Is that the elven children of the Alienage are not so inclined to meekly obey any authority that gives them orders just on their say-so."

"Well that's good?" Merrill said, now thoroughly uncertain what they were getting at.

She didn't see what the problem was. The da'len there in the city were proud elves, fully as much as any da'len of the Dalish. It was only natural that they would question her. If she had an answer, she gave it or gave them enough information to come to their own conclusions on it. If she did not have an answer, she did not lie to them. They _could_ be rowdy and exuberant, but Merrill was accustomed to running herd on Dalish little da'len, thus she knew that it was foolish to attempt to fight it. Energy like that benefited from being _redirected_. She engaged their minds and energy with games and puzzles that would help them learn better than if she nattered on at them all day.

"They are delightful, bright children," Merrill said firmly, at least here being on solid ground. "They have strong spirits and they can all be very clever in their own ways."

For some reason, Philomela and Saena seemed to share a long, weighty glance and laughed. Hard. Merrill looked on in growing perplexity and the ever-present worry that they were laughing at her.

"You see?" said Saena, sounding as though she might have won an argument.

"Oh, very well," Philomela grumbled, sounding grudging but not angry.

Saena turned back to Merrill and said

"We've heard plenty about your work here, teaching our children when the Chantry has failed us. We know about your, er, magical proclivities."

"She means the blood-magic," Philomela added with a disapproving frown.

"Um, about that..." Merrill said hesitantly. "I've been studying the ancient elven magics of the distant past and I'm now currently working on something that should, if everything goes well, make it so I won't need to use blood magic anymore."

Merrill very carefully did not mention that the method she would need to use in order to attain a workaround for blood magic was itself going to require blood magic. Once that step was over with, if everything went well, she would never need to use the bloodstones again. She had so far made twenty stones, only ten remained to her, and Wisdom had said that they were nearly on the cusp of solving the last of the problems with bringing a method of translating ancient elven spellwebs into a method that could be practiced in modern times. Merrill's new method wasn't as elegant and flexible as the ancient elven spellweb had been, but... it would work in the current magic of the era and that was what mattered so far as Merrill was concerned.

"I don't know for certain that it will work," Merrill hastened to add lest she should inadvertently make them an implied promise that she couldn't fulfill. "But I'm working hard on it, and we'll just have to see."

"Perram has said that you told him you were looking into a way to help the Alienage," Saena said.

"The research I'm pursuing now is a stepping stone, yes," Merrill replied. "There's frankly a lot of hurdles to overcome, but I've come far from where I started. I'm hoping to push my knowledge and capabilities a little bit further, but I think that whatever solution is found is probably going to need everyone's help. I know I surely can't do it alone."

"That may be the first time I've ever heard you say that," Aveline muttered dryly, referring to Merrill's tendency to try to treat everything as her own solitary burden to bear.

"I'm not _stupid_ ," Merrill mumbled, feeling a bit injured at the censure in the guardswoman's tone. "And I _am_ trying."

"Research is one thing girl," Philomela said. "But we can't eat research or use it to shelter us from the rain. We need something _practical_!"

Merrill nodded agreement and asked if they had any suggestions for her to concentrate her efforts on.

"I don't suppose there's anything in your research that could give us fishing boats?" Saena asked hopefully. "With the Chantry not upholding their directive to feed those of the Faithful who are hungry, even if they _are_ elves, we're all getting in desperate need of something to eat. We've heard that you're feeding our littles, and we're grateful for that, but we have elderly and sick as well who need food in the Alienage. Maybe you could ask your kin to waterproof some of those funny ships they use?"

"Actually," Merrill said brightening. "I could probably give you a solution to your lack of fishing boats, without even needing to do any other research. When the Dalish need to weatherproof their arravels, we use a special sort of substance that works wonders!"

Merrill was talking about the steel-skin, the same substance she had used to all but replace Fenris' roof. It was weatherproof and it did not leak, so a substance that sheltered from the rain would also serve the more traditional function of making vessels that could be sailed on the sea.

"It's created by magic, of course," she added. "It's the job of a Keeper or a First to make it, but once it's made, you just take paper or cloth or tree-bark and you dip it in and then sort of plaster it on a frame."

Merrill unconsciously pantomimed the action of dipping and spreading out the strips onto a frame.

"Then you wait a few days so that it has time to dry. It'll shrink a bit so don't plaster it on too tight. Once it's done drying you can use the boat."

"That... sounds like might work," Saena said with caution in her tone.

"The problem will be getting the wood for the frame," Philomela said bluntly. "You know that Noble House who holds timber rights wouldn't want to sell to the elves for less when they can sell their timber to the Merchants and make more."

"All you need is a frame to plaster on, it doesn't necessarily need to be a _permanent_ frame," Merrill added helpfully. "The steelskin holds its shape once it's done curing. You just need to make it thick enough. I could grow you all some ironbark vines, my own development-"

Merrill couldn't keep the note of pride from her voice.

"And you can use that to make ships?"

Saena and Philomela shared a long speaking look, finally Saena shrugged and Philomela said in a resigned tone

"If we're going to throw our lot in with magic, we might as well begin as we mean to go on then."

Merrill felt a surge of delight. The Alienage, while still not allowing her back into the fold, was going to let her help them! She knew that she was never going to be accepted back into her own Clan, or even back among her peo- er, the Dalish, so the elves of the Alienage was really her last hope of having a people of her own. This was going to be the first step in getting them to let her help them, and maybe eventually help them rebuild completely... once she'd figured out how.

"Great!" Merrill said happily.

In her head she was already going through the places where she could purchase or forage the materials she was going to need in order to make the steelskin.

"I'm almost finished with my current project," she hurried on. "Just give me three more days to finish up and track down all the things I'm going to need to make it... it's quite a long list you know, and then come back in another three days after that. I guess that'll make it about a week. If you want enough to make more than one or two ships, then I'll need to get enough supplies to make a few really large batches."

She didn't mention that some of the ingredients, if they were not foraged directly from the sources and refined with magic could be quite expensive and difficult to procure. That was the main reason why not all Dalish arravells used steelskin for their hulls. But Merrill lived in a trade-city that saw exotic goods from nearly every corner of Thedas pass through it's ports, and she had plenty of money now, so she should have enough to buy the materials she needed in the quantities she required.

"We'll talk about this with Eist," Saena said. "If we're going to have more than one or two fishing vessels it's better we let him be in charge of it. He hasn't gotten the chance to design any boats for some time, he'd be angry if we excluded him."

"I can hear his cackle already," Philomela said dryly.

She turned to Merrill.

"Very well girl, you get done what you need to, and we will meet you back here in a week."

Merrill smiled and nodded, feeling newly energized for her work now that she knew that she was going to be of use to the Alienage. If they liked her ships, and they heard she wouldn't practice blood magic around them, they might let her back in, perhaps even listen to her suggestions one she'd researched a way to help them with their housing problem.

 _:But first thing's first,_ : Merrill cautioned herself as she quickly gathered her things and practically skipped back to her little room in Fenris' Mansion. _:I have to get my current projects finished with so I'll have some decent resources to work with.:_

"Lucien!" she called out once she'd let herself into the kitchen. "Please make note so I don't forget later that I want to start shopping for supplies for steelskin early tomorrow morning. Also, ask Pontius to make sweetrolls int eh morning for the children, a batch of twenty-seven will be enough, in addition, see if he'll take over the morning bread-bake for me. Oh! And I need to clear out a corner plot to start growing some ironbark vines to harvest."

With a lightened heart, Merrill walked back to the corner where she did most of her meditating at and all but launched herself across the Veil, utterly determined that this day would be the one in which she would solve the last, persnickety little difficulties with translating ancient spellwebs to work in modern times so that she could get on with her work.


	21. Chapter 21

"Hullo Perram," Merrill said cheerfully, greeting him early that morning with her market basket, as well as a tall carry-basket loaded onto her back. "I was hoping I might gain your help this morning if you're not busy already."

"Sure Merrill," Perram said, looking glad to see her. "Sorry I didn't come to lessons yesterday, Shinnie fell sick from eating a rotted fish she found and couldn't stop throwing up."

"You should bring her to me," Merrill said. "I have a good potion for that."

"She's scared of magic," Perram said as though it should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Merrill sighed dejectedly. Every time she thought that the Dalish and city elves weren't all that different, she ran smack in to one of their differences. In her Clan it had been taken as a matter of course that the Keeper would use her magic to heal those who needed it and the Clan hadn't hesitated to go to her when something was wrong.

"What if I just give _you_ the potion then," Merrill pursued as she handed him her list of items that she wished to buy and sat back to watch him sound out the words without her help.

He needed the practice.

"I s'pose that'll work," he agreed absently as he concentrted the bulk of his attention on parsing ou the words in front of him. "I guess I don't need to tell her where I got it from."

Most of the ingredients on her list Perram knew where to purchase from, but there were several that were very obscure and would probably be difficult to find, even for a young man that specialized in working the marketplaces. Fortunately Merrill knew which vendors sold them, and about what price a shem might pay to buy it, she was simply no good at arguing them down in price. Perram, however, was a master at his trade. By the time her early morning lesson-time rolled around, Merrill had purchased roughly half of the items on her list, and spent less coin than she would have if she'd been doing it herself.

"Perram," she said, a thought occurring to her. "If you can't be at afternoon lessons again today, I have a bargain for you. I will give you the coin I have on me if you will hunt down and buy the rest of the ingredients on the list on my behalf, in as large a quantity that these merchants will sell to you. Come to the back garden at Fenris' house this evening after six bells. I'll give you the potion for your friend and I'll give a... what's that city-word for the paying of service?"

"Commission," Perram replied eagerly.

"Yes that, but there _is_ a catch," she cautioned, raising a finger. "Since you're missing your afternoon lessons, you have to agree to spend an hour this evening in study with me."

He hesitated, and Merrill figured the reason behind it was that the extra lessons would cut into the hour he would have to catch a good deal on leftovers from the market for his dinner so Merrill added

"I will feed you dinner."

His eyes lit up. Merrill honestly couldn't blame him, even by Dalish standards, Merrill's offer was quite generous. He shook on it immediately, before she could change her mind, and Merrill went off to Hawke's abandoned old mansion to teach her children for the afternoon with a pleased feeling, knowing that the task was in good hands and she would not need to worry about it. When she arrived, she found her children in higher spirits than usual. It seemed that word had spread around the Alienage that they were soon to have fishing boats again.

"I don't see the fuss," Merrill remarked in puzzlement.

"That's cuz yer Dalish," one of the children, and over-wise young boy about nine winters old said.

"Think of those boats as being sort of like a life-line fer us," a younger girl who strongly resembled him, his cousin or sister perhaps. "They's a lot like, um, them land-ships you Dalish use?"

"Arravells," Merrill supplied the word and would have gone on to explain about them, but her children were eager to talk about why their ships were so important to them.

"Most o' our boats are rented to us by the shem," the boy said in a lecturing tone, remarkably similar to Merrill's when she had a subject that needed lecturing on. "Sos we gotta pay a cut of our catch to them, and it's a _biiiig_ cut. We usually can't even sell whatever fish we have leftover when they take out their share in market 'cept by special permit, an' shem don't like givin' those out ta us elves no-how. If we _do_ manage to sell some of our catch, we still gotta pay land tax ta city, so we set aside fer that after we buy what we kin live off. Mostly, our boats were always used ta get fish to eat with."

"Why rent them?" Merrill asked in puzzlement. "Why not build your own boats?"

"Shem," the girl said succinctly. "There's a Noble House that holds all the rights ta cuttin' down timber ta make boats in the first place and they don't sell their wood fer cheap. They'd rather sell to a wealthy merchant to make him richer than sell to elves what can't barely afford it at all."

"I see," Merrill said filing the information away.

Then she got an idea.

"Instead of me teaching you today," Merrill said. "How about we switch it round? You all can teach _me_ today. I don't know much about how and where work is done in the Alienage, so I have questions, if anyone knows the answer raise their hand and I'll call on one."

The children were, naturally, delighted with the opportunity to show off their knowledge in front of their Keeper, so Merrill gamely, knelt down Dalish-style on a cushion, with her legs folded under her and her weight resting on her ankles, and asked her first question.

She learned a lot of things about life in the Alienage that afternoon that she hadn't known before. She learned that those elves who were "lucky" enough to be employed often did not see much in the way of wages, and almost all of those wages went immediately to providing for their kin. The citizens of the Alienage were generally employed either in domestic service (the low-paying menial sort that had them toiling from before dawn to after dark) or as sailors and dock-workers who also made a bare pittance of a wage. Some elves were hired by absentee merchants to run booths and stalls of lesser import to them while the humans minded the shops where they made their _real_ money, but even the lucky elves who managed to land a job working in a vending stall did not see much in the way of pay, and the penalties for being caught stealing were very harsh.

Now that she knew the basics about where their food and wages came from, Merrill's next question was about fresh water for drinking. She learned that a well in the Alienage _existed_ , but no-one used it because either chokemist from underground came along and poisoned the well, or the waste from higher up the hill in Hightown flowed down to cause problems. Fresh water was usually sought outside, at the wells in lowtown, and the residents _there_ were resentful of it.

There were various other unwritten strictures in place, she learned, that were, though the city elves probably couldn't see it, designed to keep them in poverty. The Chantry technically was _supposed_ to educate them, but when elven children were expected to work as soon as they were able to in order to aid their family and keep food in their mouths. It was difficult to send even one child to school... especially when it was all the way across the city. When Merrill asked why none of the Chantry Sisters came down to the Alienage to school the young elven children and other poor children, she was laughed at. Merrill took that to mean that the odds were so unlikely that she might as well have been speaking elven at them.

Merrill went home at the end of her school-day in a determined, contemplative mood.

 _:Clearly,:_ she thought to herself as she let herself in through the wards into the kitchen where Pontius was making food. _:If I am going to serve this Alienage properly, I'll need to do more than give them proper shelter, however **that** is to be done.:_

She still had yet to even start work on researching a way to make a shelter that would fit them all in it.

_:They'll need food, and clean water too, but more than that it looks like they'll need... opportunity?:_

Merrill couldn't even begin to guess where _that_ was going to come from. The Alienage was so poor in resources to start with.

_:I suppose I could easily pay them out of my own pocket with my share of the money from the vault, but even that money will eventually run out, and they still wouldn't have a place to call home. I suppose I shall need to look into it very soon. As soon as I am done planting my spell-tree and making my wisdom-book-eluvian.:_

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. She sensed who it was through the wards by his aural signature and told Lucien to let Perram in. The young elven boy stepped into Merrill's kitchen with both her market-basket _and_ her carry-basket on his back filled to overflowing with the materials she asked for.

"My!" she exclaimed in pleasure. "You did very well Perram!"

"Thank-you," he nodded his head and looking pleased with himself.

Merrill placed the sack full of goods in the corner near Lucien's hearth and let the boy in to eat dinner. While he ate she signed the latest lessons written in hardlight into the air before her (a trick that Lucien and Wisdom had taught to her) letting them hang, glowing, in the air and telling him how to work the math problems she had set to her children earlier that day. Perram was a very bright boy and he learned quickly, especially math which he used often in his unofficial profession. His reading was coming along apace, but he did need more practice to help him work on his fluency. When he had eaten his fill, a full two bowls of thick soup and as many rolls as he could grab, Merrill set him to reading aloud from a simple book she'd selected for him, and he obediently did so. Fenris walked into the middle of lessons, a quick glance of his no doubt taking in the clutter of baskets next to the hearth, the boy and Merrill clearly teaching him.

"Hullo Fenris, would you care to join us?" she asked over her shoulder.

He said nothing, but sat at the table and allowed Pontius to deliver to him a large bowl of soup and a basket of rolls, along with some cheese and jam for his roll. Merrill continued to help her young student sound his way through his reading, only occasionally needing to correct his pronunciation, or explain a rule about spelling. Next she pulled out a slate and they worked on his writing. To her great surprise, Fenris did not leave immediately after he'd finished his meal, but stuck around to observe as she patiently tutored Perram through his letters and had him write out several simple sentences on his slate.

"You're a very bright young man, Perram," Merrill said warmly after he'd written his sentences ten times without any mistakes.

She handed him a pouch with two rounds of tough bread, a repurposed wine-bottle full of a magic water-cleansing potion that Merrill had brewed up, and a smaller bottle that held the potion for his little friend Shinnie to help her feel better. She assumed that whatever coin was left from his shopping trip he had either secreted away already or was hidden somewhere on his person. Indeed, once Perram had finished hiding his goods in various spots about him, Merrill couldn't even tell he was carrying anything.

"I hope to see you tomorrow at lessons," Merrill said. "I'll be bringing lots of that bread you like, and there will be jam-tarts as well."

Perram flashed a delighted grin and let himself out.

"You bribe them with food," Fenris noted as he left, sounding not entirely approving.

"I'd feed them anyway, as it's a Keeper's duty," Merrill said. "It's sad to say, but most of these children don't see reading and writing or doing sums as anything that's going to be of any use to them in the long run. Their parents did menial work, and their parents parents did menial work, and their parents parents parents did menial work, so all they think _they_ will ever do is menial work. I bribe them with food to get them in the door, and with treats to get them to study hard, and I hope that I can plant the seeds in them that will let them build better lives for themselves."

Fenris gave her a long, unreadable look and turned to depart for his quarters without another word.

"Huh," Merrill remarked to Lucien. "I wonder what's with him lately?"

"Dunno, Missus," Lucien said in a tone that implied he didn't much care either. "Shall we get started on your brew?"

Lucien, being a Spirit tied to the hearth, had been looking forward to Merrill's mirror-project and her steelskin brewing project possibly more than Merrill herself had because it meant that he would get to actively help her use magic for her work. Merrill sorted the ingredients and went over the process for brewing it with him again. They were going to create it in the way the Dalish stored it for long-keeping, that was, they would make it in two parts, the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients. The wet would be safely bottled in spell-sealed bottles, and the dry would be kept in weatherproof barrels for later need. They stored well separately, but once they were heated and mixed they had to be kept warm and used within a day before they could begin to cure, otherwise one wound up with a mess in the cauldron.

"Ready when you are, Missus!" Lucien said in an anticipatory tone.

The ingredients for the wet were the more delicate of the two, the temperature had to be kept exact, which meant a lot of minute adjustments on Lucien's part. Merrill, because she wasn't watching the fire like a hawk, could now devote her whole attention to using her magic to get the ingredients to combine just right. She infused the mixture with her power so that it would activate properly when the time came to mix the wet with the dry ingredients, and then spent a while bottling up the wet mix in her plethora of washed wine bottles and sealing them in ways both mundane and magic. It was midnight before she was done, and Merrill still had yet to infuse her bloodstone for that night.

She hurriedly washed up in the deep laundry sink and padded naked over to her room for bed. Once in bed she sank her concentration into meditation, attuning her body to the magic of the Fade, then unsealed her inner gates and allowed power from the Fade o roll into her, flooding through her magical pathways and causing her whole being to almost feel like it was singing, or that she was a crystal glass next to a tuning-fork. She let the power flow and build for a while, until even her blood was saturated, then she pulled it in, herding the magic infused in her blood into a single area just below the skin of her right wrist. She placed the already prepared diamond next to her skin, pushed a little of her magic into it, then nicked her skin ever so slightly and when the blood magic would have dissipated to fuel a spell, Merrill instead pushed it into the stone. Because of their similar carbon structure the blood could be made to fuse physically with the cores of the stone, and this physical anchor made it possible to channel and fuse the powerful magic in place. By the time she'd finished with the ritual, she was quite weary.

 _:I can't wait until all of this is done with,:_ Merrill thought tiredly as she set the bloodstone in a specially sealed box that she kept hidden in her room.

She fell into a tired slumber and went to visit with Wisdom to hopefully iron out the last of the difficulties in creating her own magical eluvian interface-book.

* * *

"Final testing and diagnostics complete," Wisdom reported of what felt like her billionth trial in getting the revised spell-array for a working quasi-eluvian to work.

She'd been working on the project for weeks, suffering set-back after set-back in her quest to find a reliable way to adapt the spellwebs of ancient arlathan to work in the (apparently very different) magical climate of Merrill's current era. She'd done research on concepts devised by the ancients using Wisdom's access to ancient knowledge, but more than that, Merrill had also put the library in Fenris' Mansion to good use, researching other modern techniques used by other peoples; Dwarven studies of mechanics and engineering, Tevinter concepts of ward-webs, Rivaini Dreamer's work, _anything_ that she could lay her hands on that seemed like it might be useful with the right effort and a little imagination. It hadn't been easy, but Merrill had solved each problem one by one, just as she had in working on repairing her eluvian. After nearly a month, she felt that she might have at last hit upon a solution that could work.

"Eissa-balance and flow working at one-hundred percent capacity," Wisdom reported mildly.

Merrill jumped up and shouted jubilantly. She spun around and danced in place, utterly elated.

"Proof of concept logged," Wisdom added, ignoring Merrill's antics. "Translating the inner san'shii'an of the nei-eluvian into new pattern..."

There was a long pause while the magical formulae that had been used by the ancients was transcribed and rearranged to fit the adapted new pattern that Merrill had worked hard to create that would, if all went well, enable her to recreate the ancient elven technologies in the magical climate of modern times.

"Translation complete. Running diagnostic now."

The pause to see if it would actually work under simulated conditions seemed interminable to Merrill. She sent a quick prayer to June, God of Crafts, that her work would balance out and that everything would run smoothly... and that she wouldn't have to keep working at yet another snag in the gears.

"Diagnostic complete, no anomalies detected. Project successful," Wisdom reported in her mild manner.

Merrill, if she'd been in her physical body, might have actually fainted from relief at the Spirit's pronouncement.

"Do you wish the final project transferred directly to your mind for working in the physical world, Merrill-nuri?" Wisdom inquired.

Merrill considered the question. On one hand, direct transferal was much faster than her memorizing every detail and reworking it when she went to cast it. On the other hand... it left her with a _splitting_ _headache_. In the end, Merrill decided to risk the headache on the grounds that she wanted to have all of the details she had worked so hard on perfect in her mind when she went to forge her elven book of wonders.

Her mind felt stretched to the absolute limit when Wisdom began the transferral. If she had not already been a First and therefore had received the Lore from her Keeper once she'd been judged old enough to receive her valla'sliin, Merrill would likely have had a much more difficult time in receiving information transferal from a Spirit. When she woke to her own body Merrill had to go into her room, pull a blanket up over the window, and lay down for a few hours in utter silence. The headache was a particularly terrible one, but Merrill bore it because she had a goal in mind.

That night, once the incredible migraine had subsided, Merrill went out into the kitchen and Pontius served her a bowl of broth and concern. Lucien chided her gently about trying to act too much like a Spirit when she was a creature of Flesh. Merrill ate her broth quietly.

"Lucien," she asked next. "Is Fenris in the wards?"

"He went ta bed hours ago," Lucien said. "Ya ben asleep so long, it's th' middle o' the night, Missus."

"Perfect," Merrill said. "We can get started now."

Once she'd had all of the robin's egg-sized diamond's she'd needed to complete her set of bloodstones for her spell-tree project, Merrill had reset a few of the parameters on her cold-forge so that the forge would produce much smaller diamonds for her to use in her eluvian-project. She'd also collected all of the other materials that she was going to need, sometimes mage-crafting mundane articles into materials from arlathan that simply were not produced naturally.

"Yer plannin' on makin' the eluvian t'night?" Lucien said, looking surprised.

"Soonest started is soonest done," Merrill replied. "I have the spellwebs worked out and with your help we can forge it on both sides of the Fade right here in the hearth. You can create that sort of fire, right?"

"Yeah... but... it ain't _common_ missus."

Part of the trick of the eluvian (and Merrill suspected, the reason why her _own_ eluvian had remained inert despite her efforts) was that common, ordinary fire would not _do_ to forge it. It required _Veilfire_ , the magical embodiment of fire, in order to forge the spellwebs into the eluvian-glass, aything less would result in failure.

"Let us begin then," Merrill said.

The hearth glowed a spooky-looking green as Lucien summoned Veilfire to forge Merrill's mirror-book. While Lucien was preparing his forge-magics, Merrill set her materials up very carefully. She measured very carefully and precisely out the portions of each material that she would need so that she would be ready when the time came. She set up the diamond sand, the metal-salts, and the other minerals that were needed to craft the silverglass of the eluvian. Then Merrill began the delicate task of setting up the first of the layers of spellwebs that would would be needed while she waited for Luciens mage-forge to start accumulating magical energy (or heating up, she supposed). The spells were precise and very, very finiky. Unless every single detail was set up exactly right to the last iota of energy, the whole project would be a failure and Merrill would have to start over again. Even with Wisdom having dumped all of the details of the magical working into her mind and made it s that she could recal it with perfect clarity, Merrill check and rechecked her work before she proceeded. The tricky part, she knew, would be in concentrating both on her work in the physical world _and_ upon casting the mirror-spell in the Fade simultaneously. The Veilfire, when it melted the substances, infused everything with magic, and Merrill's part became one that was as much guiding the energy as it was writing out the complex spellwebs into the molten glass.

There was no room for error; glass magic was as fragile and brittle as the substance it used, at least while it was yet-unformed. Once cast, it could be versatile because of the user-interface built into the spellweb arrays, but until that point, the tiniest misstep would spell failure. Merrill had worked for many years on an eluvian so she knew that patience and precision were the hallmarks of the skill. She locked her emotions away and forced herself to concentrate, focusing her entire being on the performing the minutiae of the spell _exactly_ as it was written, neither too much nor too little energy, _precisely_ by the numbers.

* * *

It felt like days, but it had only been hours, later when she completed the spell, Lucien banished the Veilfire from the hearth and Merrill was left with a rather common-looking, rectangular looking-glass. Her exhausted reflection stared back at her as the first dim light of dawn tried to sneak in through the kitchen window.

"Moment of truth," she muttered, almost too tired to feel elation or excitement as she tested out her eluvian-book for the first time to see if all of her hard work had paid off.

She placed her palm flat against the mirrors surface, a flash of light read the patterns of whorls and swirls in the delicate ridges written into her skin, confirming her physical identity, while the light touched against her hand warmed slightly as the security spellwebs written into the eluvian-book read her aural-signature to confirm her magical identity. One might be faked, Wisdom had warned her, but rarely the other. Merrill had felt at first, that all the bother with security was silly but then she thought about the shemlen being able to access the knowledge of Arlathan through her book, if they should ever get hold of it, so Merrill kept in the security measures just in case.

"It works!" she sighed happily, too tired from her work to shout or dance or do anything but slump down with relief.

Years of work. Nearly a _decade_ of work. She had finally crafted a working eluvian... of a sort. It's functions were seerely limited when compared to a true eluvian; it merely accessed and stored information as opposed to being able to communicate over long distances or move things instantaneously from point to point through space... yes that was true and it was limited, but dammit, it _worked_!

Merrill swiped a finger over the surface to banish the unlocking-screen and the first of the user interfaces built into the device, the two-dimensional user interface, appeared before her eyes. There was a picture-like design written in light sort of underneath the surface of the mirror where and ordinary reflection might be that showed tiny pictures that she and Wisdom had worked out that signified certain different tasks that her little eluvian book could be made to perform. There was a little picture of a scroll and quill that would access a function built into the interface that would enable Merrill to write things down like she was writing in a notebook, and the things she wrote in it would be stored away in a little spell-pocket that she could call up later. There was another little picture that looked like an open book with an elven vallan-symbol meaning "wisdom" on it that, when Merrill selected it, would put her in direct contact with Wisdom's book. She would be able to make queries and receive replies, or Wisdom could put her in direct contact with the "knowledge hub" to seek her answers. Another icon held a complex-looking little vallan character that Merrill would use to turn her eluvian book into a three-dimensional work-space, like Wisdom's book could do. And last there was a picture that looked like a little portrait, that enabled a fun spell that Merrill had decided to keep in for giggles. It would retain and store an image of whatever Merrill saw in the mirror's surface to be called up later, or even copied to paper, though other materials were needed for a faithful paper-reproduction of an image.

Merrill tested out the eluvian notebook first, making certain that the little note she wrote could be tucked away and recalled at will. Then she pressed on the little pictogram of an open book and saw Wisdom's visage in the surface of the mirror, the device vibrated ever so slightly as Merrill inquired how things were working on her end, and the Spirit replied that there had been no complications detected. Merrill signed off from her communication with the Spirit and then decided to test out the three-dimensional work-space she'd built into her new eluvian-book. She layed her mirror flat on the table and activated the three-dimentional user-interface, pulling up multiple translucent work-boards and arranging them to hover at different points in the air over the surface of the eluvian. The workboards all contained all of the different trails of research that Merrill had put into perfecting her eluvian spell, which Wisdom had saved in her remote workbook that she could now access when she called it up.

"Makers hairy ass, Witch!" Fenris growled in obvious exasperation when he wandered shirtless into the kitchen and saw her playing happily with her new elven book of wonders.

Merrill smiled widely over at him, getting an idea. She banished the three dimensional workboard with a flick of her fingers and accessed the portrait icon in the main interface screen as Fenris sat down at the table, glaring at her.

"I _knew_ you had been too quiet lately," he grumbled. "I should have known, I don't know _why_ I'm surprised. This place is already infested with those abominations no matter how nice they appear. It was only a matter of time before your accursed demon-mirror made an appearance."

"This isn't an eluvian, Fenris," Merrill corrected him primly, fiddling around with the settings of her new toy. "At least, it's not an eluvian like the one I was trying to make. It's not a _true_ eluvian. Nothing can cross through it. It just records, stores and displays information... like a book or a library, only better."

Merrill left out the part about accessing Wisdom's knowledge hub, knowing that he'd only misunderstand about it and fuss all day long about her bringing demons into the world when she was doing nothing of the sort. Merrill walked round the table with a wide grin on her face at the little joke she was about to have. He scowled darkly at her in his usual fashion as she walked around the back of his chair where he sat eating breakfast without a shirt on. She leaned in close to him, invading his personal space, and set her head right beside his, holding out her eluvian-book at arms length so that it reflected the image of their two faces, side by side, back at them. Merrill smiled happily back at the reflected image of herself while Fenris's brow puckered in puzzlement and he scowled at her, possibly mostly on general principle.

"Smile, Fenris!" Merrill said cheerfully.

His frown, characteristically, only grew deeper. Merrill activated the spell to retain an image in the eluvian's memory and the eluvian flashed brightly at them for a split second. Fenris jerked back in surprise and even Merrill started a bit. Then she moved the mirror and watched in satisfaction as the image remained fascinatingly frozen in it. Fenris's scowl was now preserved in perfect detail for posterity.

"What witchcraft are you working now, Witch?" he demanded. "That better not have stolen my soul."

"Really Fenris, it's just an image of you!" Merrill reassured him, releasing the spell at him again and catching another of his face frozen in mid-accusation. "Just like if you were to have someone paint your portrait, only you don't have a lying artist, covering up your flaws for a commission."

Merrill took another image, just of herself, smiling and trying for a better angle to see if she could get an image that looked more flattering. He frowned harder at her as Merrill held up the mirror, hoping to get another image of him. He ducked behind the table, wanting nothing to do with having his image taken by a spooky demon-mirror. Merrill giggled and flicked the image-taker out of the way.

"It's safe now, you can come out, there's no scary image-keeper up right now."

Merrill turned back to her three-dimensional workspace, placing her glass flat upon the table and calling up her ongoing spellweb project. The complex tangle of arrays she was currently working through appeared, hovering in hardlight images above her mirror and letting Merrill enlarge and shrink them, moving them this way and that to see them from different angles.

Fenris sighed and shook his head.

"I knew it was too much to hope that you'd decided to settle on a quieter, more peaceful sort of life, feeding and educating children," he said disapprovingly.

"I want to help the _whole_ Alienage, Fenris," Merrill replied candidly. "Not only just the children."

He snorted.

"Help them how, Witch? I suppose you have some sort of abominable magic practice in mind to fix everything?"

Merrill paused and then candidly said.

"I don't _know_ yet. But I'm sure if I only just keep working at it, I'm bound to come up with something."

Merrill banished her on-going projects and instead called up Wisdom, but had her operate in silent-mode where she wrote out her responses to Merrill's queries instead of alerting Fenris that there was yet another Spirit hanging about in his demesne on the other side of the Veil. Merrill wrote in a request for Wisdom to access the most common and useful spellwebs that had been used in Arlathan to deal with sanitation, water purification and the storage of food. A heartbeat later, Merrill's workspace was flooded with what felt like a thousand different translucent workboard-scrolls, all popping up out of the mirrors surface in answer to her query.

 _:I see that I'm going to need to refine my research parameters,:_ Merrill thought to herself, feeling a bit overwhelmed and undeniably happy at the thought of so much knowledge at her fingertips.

Now she felt _truly_ wealthy. Fenris rolled his eyes, grumbled a bit to himself and took his breakfast off into another room where she _wasn't_ doing witchy things with demon-mirrors. Merrill ignored him and decided to refine her query by having Wisdom sort out the water-purification and sanitation spellwebs that would likely be the most compatible with being adapted into the spellweb array parameters that Merrill had developed to enable her mirror-book to work in the modern day magical climate. The number of workboards lessened by a great deal but there were still at least hundred different options, if not more, hovering in the air above the table.

 _:It looks like I have my work cut out for me,:_ Merrill thought happily.


	22. Chapter 22

"He's gone out of the wards, Missus," Lucien reports, essentially blowing the all clear signal.

Merrill took the workspace off silent mode and addressed Wisdom directly as her image appeared to hover over the surface of the mirror in translucent light.

"It still feels like there's a lot of options to weed thorugh, Wisdom. Now, of these last I want you to rank them by potential adaptive compatibility, and then by the amount of energy you estimate that it might cost to run them. Then after that, I want you to sort of label them by the sets of Functions that each option offers."

The workboards rearranged themselves and Merrill spent the morning weeding through them before she took up her basket full of breads and treats and walked down to Hawke's Mansion to teach the children for the morning, wrapping her book up safely. She started toward her room to lock it in her trunk with her other possessions but Lucien stopped her.

"If it's all that valuable to ya, Missus," he said. "Ya might wanna put it safe in the vault."

Merrill nodded at the wisdom of his words and took an extra few minutes to unlock everything, skip down the spiral steps to the vault and lock away her precious, precious mirror-book safely in a drawer.

"I should really see about having a special protector crafted for it so it doesn't break if I should ever drop it," Merrill mused to herself on her way to teach children for the day.

When she arrived at Hawke's Mansion, Merrill was surprised to see two adults waiting for her there in among all of the children who went to her for lessons every day instead of going out onto the streets of Kirkwall to work for a living. One of her visitors was Saena, and the other was a strong, spry but very old-looking male elf with a gleam of intelligence in his eyes.

"Merrill, this is Eist," Saena introduced them after Merrill had given them all thier loaves of morning bread and shooed them out to the courtyard to eat, run around and get the edge of thier energy before thier morning lessons. "He has served as one of the main managers, insofar as the shem will ever let an elf manage anything, and builders of the Shipwrights Guild here in Kirkwall. He's served for twenty years in all capacities pertaining to running a port, he's forgotten more about docks, ports and shipbuilding than most of us will ever learn."

Merrill bowed politely to the knowledgeable hahren who cackled a bit, rubbing his hands together.

"So, Seana and Philomela tell me you've a way to be rid of that pesky dependence upon wood to build a ship," he said, his voice sounded younger than his years as it was filled with anticipation and mischief. "Using magic? Sounds risky..."

His eyes lit up with a gleam.

"But sailing is always a risk and we need boats," he finished. "So let's have it then, this miraculous Dalish substance of yours."

"Um... It's ready, but I didn't bring it with me," Merrill apologized. "It's stored in separate batches, wet and dry, but it takes a mage to mix them up proper. Plus, I haven't harvested the ironbark to make a frame, and I've been so busy on other things that I don't have the rag strips for dipping."

"It's this frame that interests me," Eist said. "How big can you make it?"

Merrill considered the question.

"When the Dalish build arravells, we must always consider the factor of weight," she said, reasoning aloud. "Our arravels must be pulled by halla you see, and halla are not very big, nor very strong so we cannot make them very large. That said, with the right sort of structure... I suppose that a steelskin hull can be made to about any size, so long as there is enough steelskin to spread evenly."

Merrill brightened and quickly grabbed up a piece of chalk and went to her slateboard, wishing she'd took the risk and brought along her new mirror-book with her instead. Wisdom had shown her live pictures of the sorts of ships that the ancient elves of Arlathan had used to sail upon the open seas during one of her idle queries as to whether steelskin had been developed in ancient arlathan... which of course, it had.

"I don't suppose you've ever seen a boat that looks like this?" Merrill asked, quickly sketching out a rough drawing of the front, side and top-down of one of the longboats favored by the ancient elves of arlathan.

The boat was long and crafted along elegant curves, the streamlined design accommodated by a supple, ribbed hull, an even keel and wide almost flat bottom except for the keel. There were three smaller masts jutting up into the air along the center line, each with a ribbed, triangular sail that was easier to move and manipulate to catch the winds than the whole-cloth rectangular sails favored by the shem.

Eist studied the images intensely, muttering nautical terminology under his breath and after a few long moments he turned to her.

"I've never seen its like before," he said. "But I can tell by looking that the design fares as well in shallow waters as in deep, it's sturdy enough for long voyages and the suppleness of its hull means that it has better flex to adapt to changing conditions on the sea. Its maneuverable, and the distribution of weight to surface area means it can carry several times its own weight in cargo without loosing much in its ability to move over the water. Now that I've seen one, I must have it!"

Merrill felt inwardly pleased at the idea of another piece of elven technology and heritage restored to its rightful people. The Dalish certainly prided themselves on being the living repository of elven history and culture, but being a nomadic society severely limted what parts of that knowledge could be recreated in practice. Having a society that stayed in one place would make it easier to recreate the elven technologies.

"I can have better designs researched for you this evening," Merrill promised him. "And I'll harvest the ironbark to start weaving the wire-frames for the steelskin tonight. Send over a few lads tomorrow to help me carry all of the materials I've made up, and have a team of your best builders as many hands as you can get together, to help with weaving the frame what follows after."

"Are you certain it'll work?" Saena said skeptically. "It seems awfully long and thin compared to other ships I've seen. Truth to tell it looks a bit flimsy."

"I've an eye for good design, and I've put together more ships than you'll ever set foot on my girl," Eist said, rubbing his hands together with an anticipatory cackle. "This is going to set the alienage right up, you mark me."

"As you say, Hahren," Saena replied shrugging with her voice. "I guess if we're gong to throw our lot in with a mage, we should indeed begin as we mean to go on."

Merrill bowed politely as the adults took their leave and left Merrill to teach her students in peace. They were more rambunctious and energetic than usual and none of them would sit still, so Merrill took the lot of them to the back courtyard and turned their enthusiasm for new ships into a lesson in their construction. The children taught her a few things, for, growing up next to the sea and with so many of their kin working on the docks or as sailors on ships, they had all grown up knowing the ins and outs of sailing ships. Merrill awarded treats that day for being able to read words having to do with boats. Everyone got a treat that day, for even if they did not now the word on sight, they knew the sounds by heart and they could infer it quickly enough to win a prize. For many of those who had struggled with learning to read, the familiar terminology was precisely what they'd needed to make the breakthrough and Merrill wished she'd thought of it sooner.

She went home in the late afternoon and immediately began harvesting the ironbark vines she'd been growing along the trellises in the back garden. Many of her herbs, as well, were at a maturation where they could stand to be carefully harvested for the first time, so Merrill set her book up with a request that Wisdom should write out in-depth designs for arlathan-style longboats on several large parchment sheets that she provided while Merrill went about her work in the back garden, collecting her first careful harvest of herbs and bringing them in to dry and cure properly before she used them for potions.

After a dinner that Fenris had given a wide berth, probably out of fear of Merrill's new magical mirror, she set up the materials she was going to need for the next morning, and then spent the evening charging her last bloodstone. The anchor-stone diamonds had already had the prewritten spellwebs burned into their matrices, and now with the last bloodstone charged, Merrill would be able to set up the grounding array for her spell-tree seed at any time she wished.

 _:Tomorrow I'll likely be busy all day with helping to combine the steelskin ingredients properly so that they can start crafting the hulls of their new fishing longboats,:_ Merrill mused to herself as she went to be tiredly. _:But perhaps that evening or the morning after...:_

Bright and early (and coincidentally in time for breakfast) a team of ten strong young men and women who looked like they spent all day working out in the sun, showed up at the doorstep of Feris' mansion with carts to take the materials back to the alienage. Merrill supervised them nervously as they carefully packed in the multitudes of re-purposed wine bottles padded by ragged linens that held the wet ingredients, and the boxes of dry ingredients, the huge pile of rags and thick parchment paper that Merrill had bought to apply the steelskin with, the long twiggy stiff ironbark vines that would be used to wicker-weave a wire frame for the longboat, the long tubes of rolled up ships- plans she'd had copied for Eist to work from, and last but not least, the set of emberstones that Merrill had created to heat up the mixture to the right temperature along with the enormous copper drum she'd bought in the market place for mixing in. She followed them to the alienage but was surprised and disappointed to discover that she would not be let inside of the gate just yet. Apparently this ship-building she would be doing was her test of trust and she would only be let in after she had proven herself.

Her team of haulers instead guided her down along a frightfully narrow pathcut into the rock cliffside around the other side of the Alienage, to the Alieange's near-unusable harbor. Calling it a harbor, really was being polite. The Alienage was up a relatively short two-story cliff above them, there was a small rocky beach at the base of the cliff that was more rock than beach, and the protection from the open waters was only the result of a natural breakwater of several crags jutting up out of the water in a line. Said crags could be just as much a danger as a protection in inclement weather. Merrill found Eist and a team of about twenty-five young, tanned fit elven men and women waiting for her on the treacherous beachhead, clearly planning to build the ships right there on the beach and launch them into the alienage's tiny harbor once they were ready.

"Honestly!" she muttered to no-one in particular as she set up the massive copper drum on its frame and placed her emberstones underneath it.

There weren't any docks worth the title to hold the ships she was going to help them make and the harbor was a plain danger. They must have been truly desperate to come to her for help.

"Try to think of it as one of the ordeal that one of your Firsts go through to see if she has the mettle needed to become a Keeper," Eist advised her when he emerged from the alienage with his own crew.

He rolled out the plans she and Wisdom had drawn up the night before, and he looked them over with delighted interest, perusing the in-depth notes that Merrill had translated for him from elven. Once he was satisfied that he'd read and understood the contents in their entirety, he ordered his team to set things up under his explicit direction. Merrill had a small gaggle of her own students looking with excited interested as she poured the wet potion into the bottom of the copper drum to warm to precisely the right temperature.

"How much of this steelskin have you made for this project, Merrill?" Eist asked. "I note that the amount of this vine you've brought is well over the amount that even a very large boat would need to create a shell-frame for."

"Enough to hull three boats of the size in your plans," Merrill replied, testing the temperature of the wet with her magic.

Her children made noises of amazement when, a moment later, Merrill began infusing her magic into the warmed wet potion she'd heated up in the kettle. The wet potion went from a clear, strong smelling alchohol and changed color to bright purplish-pinkish color, glowing more and more brightly as Merrill charged it with magic, activating the inert ingredients with magic.

"Now, I need two steady hands to pour in the dry mix from those two boxes over there that I've set aside," Merrill said to her brood of younglings hovering curiously nearby to see actual magic being done.

She had no shortage of volunteers and Merril picked the two she felt would have the steadiest hands and instructed them to pour in the powdery mix slowly and as evenly as they could while she mixed it with a large ladle and combined it properly with her magic. The mixture slowly thickened under her careful watch, the color turning from a glowing purple-pink to a greyish silvery color. The precisely activated combination of wet and dry mixtures turned to a texture thicker than batter but thinner than bread dough, and it needed to be kept at a very precise consistency in order to work. The combination of the wet and dry ingredients needed to be kept warm but not too hot else it would thicken and start to congeal without being added to the hull.

"I can keep it like this as long as need be, but I suggest you don't dawdle," Merrill said. "You lot go help the sailors weave up the frame so we can be about hulling the ships properly."

The rest of the children she assigned to the wicker-frame making team, showing Eist's sailors the trick to weaving it into the correct shape. In this, at least, Eist was on firm ground, and supervised the proceedings with the trained eye of a master, leaving Merrill to keep an eye on the steelskin as it slowly developed the proper consistency. In the course of an hour, the frame was woven, then checked and rechecked to ensure that the shape was sound.

"We are ready to apply the steelskin to the frame, Merrill," Eist said firmly.

One would have thought that he went about making steelskin longboats from ancient arlathan everyday.

"Very well," Merrill said. "The steelskin is ready, if you'll have your crew watch me carefully, I'll show them how the mixture is applied."

Merrill deftly demonstrated taking a wide strip of material and immersing it so that it soaked in the steelskin and then pulling it out of the drum and letting it drip for a moment or two, to cut down on wasting the precious steelskin, then plastering it over the wireframe of the ship. She dipped and spread, dipped and spread, layering her strips over top one another in a pattern reminiscent of roofing tiles, only on a slant to accommodate the expected movement of the ship over the water so that the pull of the water wouldn't run against the grain so to speak. The sailors caught on immediately as apparently the technique of mimicking the waters movement was not unknown, and began to copy Merrill's process, at first a little clumsily, but then with greater finesse as they sorted themelves out. One of them seemed to have caught a rhythm to the work, and lifted his voice in song, which was taken up immediately by the rest, and every hand began to work in perfect time! The song changed but the work remained the same, fleshing the wireframes out more swiftly than Merrill had originally given them credit for on a first try. Merrill left one person to stir the first drum constantly while Eist set up another small team to weave out the wireframe for the hull of the second ship and Merrill started her work on combining the next copper drum to fill with the steelskin mix.

It was a long, hot, sweaty afternoon. The golden-tanned lads and lasses that clearly worked out in the sun onboard ships all day for their living might have been accustomed to the sun beating down on them while they worked, but Merrill, scholarly mage that she was, most assuredly was not! By the time the sun at last began to wester a little bit (but the heat didn't seem to let up at all) she was drenched in sweat from working her magic over a hot fire all day.

When she looked at the tanned sailors, going about their work with laughter and songs and cheer, Merrill felt at least a little bit, as though she were part of a Clan again. She didn't know the rhythmic songs they sang to help them do their work in time, but she felt a closeness with them anyway simply because the work she did was a vital part of their work.

"Most of the steelskin is gone," she noted, looking into the dregs at the bottom of the batches she'd made that day.

Merrill inspected the hulls of the two ships that Eist and his team had framed up that day, checking to be certain that the thickness of the hulls was consistent with the design and that there weren't any weak points to cause trouble for the sailors later on.

 _:He might be a cackling madman,:_ Merrill thought to herself after her inspection. _:But it seems he knows his business.:_

"These hulls will need a full week to cure properly," she informed him. "But they should be equal to whatever nature throws at them afterward. I'll return tomorrow morning to help hull the last one."

As she turned to take the treacherous, narrow path back around the jutting cliffside that the Alienage was perched precariously upon, the collected elven men and women and children all cheered at her. Merrill blushed a bit, uncertain how to take the attention and bowed politely at them in departure.

"You smell," was Fenris' polite reaction when she arrived home for dinner.

Merrill leaned her nose down and took a whiff discovering quickly that he was quite correct. She stripped immediately in the kitchen and doused herself in the laundry sink. Normally she would have loved to use hot water to ease her aching muscles, but Merrill had gotten a terrible sunburn during her work on the beach and her whole back and shoulders burned like fire.

"Must you bathe while I eat," he complained next.

"There's really no pleasing you is there?" Merrill replied tiredly, luxuriating in the feel of hot water working over her tired muscles. "And might I beg a favor of you?"

Fernis frowned at her, but to her surprise did not immediately say no.

"I've a salve for burns made up, it's in the little blue tin in that cubby over there," Merrill said. "The sun has burnt my skin what with me being out in it all day."

"Oh? So the precious little mage has suffered an injury to her delicate skin doing honest work for once?" Fenris said facetiously.

"I do lots of work outside," Merrill defended, even as she looked at him with her most piteous puppy eyes she could muster. "Just not all day to where I get burned for it. Please could you apply it where I can't reach?"

Feris grunted his acquiescence and fetched the pot of soothing cream from the cupboard.

"Your skin," he pronounced upon examining her back. "Is redder than my favorite pouch. Whatever possessed you to remove your protective clothing?"

"Everyone else was doing it, and it was so dreadfully hot," Merrill defended miserably.

She sighed in relieved contentment as Fenris slathered on the salve, the pain receding immediately in the wake of the powerful magic she'd put into it to soothe burns and heal the skin. She'd expected him to take a mean delight in pushing down hard on her tender, burned skin, but he was surprisingly very gentle and thorough in treating her pain.

"It is done," he said backing away.

"Thank you Fenris," Merrill said with true gratitude in her voice while she started smearing the cream on the rest of her body.

It would have been very difficult for her to try to get her own back after all.

"You are not shy about being naked around me," he said with a note of discomfort in his voice.

"You're lethaliin," Merrill replied simply, having decided to make him part of her Clan whether he liked it or not.

Surely sharing a living space counted as being Clan even in a city.

"The Dalish practically live in each others laps," she added as a further explanation. "And we all bathe together, so I suppose I don't think much of it."

Fenris shook his head over some private thought he declined to share with her and said

"Don't be so casual about nudity outside this place, Witch, else you're likely to find yourself facing unanticipated trouble."

"Alright Fenris," Merrill agreed easily. "Does the Alienage count? They're all elves..."

"Yes, Witch, the alienage counts," he replied in a tone that was only slightly condescending.

Merrill was strongly tempted to go ahead and tell him about her spell-tree experiment that she'd been setting up in his backyard. Her own conscience told her that he had a right to know about it as he was her lethalin. It was only the thought that he might yell at her and forbid her from trying it that stopped her. Once it was finished she could tell him she'd done it as a way to never need to use bloodmagic again, surely he'd accept it then. Her conscience still twinged at her but Merrill ignored it. She could deal with his anger later, after she had her success in hand.


	23. Chapter 23

Late in the night under the moonlight, after Fenris had already gone to bed and Lucien confirmed that he was fast asleep, Merrill crept out into the courtyard garden at the back of the mansion to the place where she had been slowly and carefully setting up the structure for the spellweb array. She had spent the last few days in conference with Wisdom, checking and re-checking the formulae for the spellweb and testing it piece by piece for soundness. She had already laid out her diamond anchor-stones with a cartographers mathematical precision in the precisely places they needed to be to set up her grounding array. Precision was important. If the webs were off by even a fingerwidth, the whole array would need to be adjusted. With tight-chested anticipation, Merrill lifted the lid of her thrice-warded and sheilded box of thirty bloodstones, placing each of them beside an anchor-stone then attuned them in preparation for the full casting that she was about to do. With almost ceremonial reverence, Merrill pulled out her spellseed and looked at it with almost maternal care, her heart swelling with the hope that it might build her and her people a new path to the future. With a final silent prayer to the Creator for luck in her endeavor, she planted it precisely in the center of the grounding array.

_:Here goes...;_ Merrill thought standing in the center of the array over-top her spellseed.

She reached out with her magic, activating the outer shell of magic in her spellseed while she simultaneously listened for the subtle humming vibration of the bloodstones she'd buried underneath the anchorstones that they'd been attuned to to help her cast the great spellweb array. She activated the six anchor-stones of the inner array, pushing the magic of the bloodstones up into their Source Nodes to help her activate the functions in each anchor-stone. The magic wanted to burst out all at once but Merrill held it back, letting the magic travel through the pre-written grids in the way that it had been designed to do. It was harder than she had thought it would be, channeling and guiding the power, but Merrill was a practiced mage accustomed to working with the power of bloodmagic, and the magic was hers. She knew the spellwebs forwards and backwards. Like water entering a channel, the spellweb arrays filled with power guided from the bloodstones by Merrill. With an unlocking twist of her thoughts, she activated the functions of the spellweb arrays one by one.

Power spiraled out form her, careful and controlled. The grids activated, the spellseed broke open precisely as it was supposed to, the first shoots of its roots flowing at her precise direction to form along the gounding channels of what would one day be the grounding array of the spelltree's roots. She could feel the life of the young tree and the nascent power of the spell multiplying itself over and over again, filling in the parameters exactly as she had written them. Merrill held back her feeling of exultation, pushing all of her energy into activating the second ring of the grounding array. Though it would remain quiescent until the spell tree grew to a certain size, the whole array needed to be activated at the same time for it would not work if she tried to go back and do it later. She worked diligently and with precision, delighting in feeling every lock click over and every flowpath fill properly. The spellseed grew to a tender shoot in the moonlight, urged on by Merrill's power. At the activation of the third and final ring of the grounding array, where everything wove together like fine cloth, Merrill felt it all form into a perfect symphony. Wonder and delight filled her as she felt the song, surely one sung in arlathan, resonate through her from the arlathan-style spellweb array that she had so painstakingly adapted and recreated. The shoot grew into a sapling, golden like the light of the dawn, and Merrill released the spell when she had done, allowing it to grow on its own as she had created it to do.

She looked down in wonder. The spells were working! They were replicating and growing ever-outward on their own It was a little tree that, when the sun came, would harvest energy from the sun which would then harvest and process magical energy. It was like a little miracle from a Dalish wonder-tale!

_:And I am... utterly exhausted,:_ Merrill thought.

She was so drained right then that she didn't even have the energy to walk back to the kitchen, she simply lay there in the grass on a warm evening and went to sleep.

* * *

She woke past dawn a few hours later to something pointy jabbing itself rudely in her side. Still tired even though she was cold and wet with dew, Merrill grumbled and tried to turn back over.

"Not now Keeper," her senses still equated sleeping outside properly with being Dalish. "Just a bit more, I promise I'll study it later."

"On your feet, witch!" a very angry and _un_ -amused Fenris growled at her.

She blinked blearily up at him. He did not look happy. Whatever might she have done to irritate him now? Then her mind flew to her tree.

"My tree!" she gasped, eyes flying open to examine her precious sapling.

It stood there, proud and golden and beautiful in the light of the dawn, radiating a pure golden energy that felt like a little song to Merrill.

"Fasta vass!" Fenris snapped, sounding utterly exasperated with her.

He followed that up with a long string of syllables in Tevene that did _not_ sound like he shared her wonder and joy with a successful experiment.

"I want an explanation as to why I feel a residue of strong blood magic, but no actual blood magic, and be quick about it," he growled warningly at her. "Your residence in my house depends upon it."

"I'm amazed you didn't just turn me out," Merrill said honestly.

"I'm considering it," he gritted.

"Well," Merrill smiled happily as he gently fingered the leaves of her beautiful creation. "I know you're always on about me using the blood magic and I thought of a way to not need it anymore..."

Merrill launched into an enthusiastic lecture about her experiment, her research into arlathan (though she kept quiet about her interaction with the spirit, Wisdom) her spellweb array (though she kept quiet about the bloodstones) and finished with,

"I know it's sudden, but I think this could really work, don't you?"

"I think it's going to be trouble," Fenris said. "But..."

His look turned calculating.

"I'll allow it, with the strict condition that you give me your word that you shall never practice blood magic ever again."

Merrill thought about it for a long moment, weighing the choice. On one hand she rather thought that his ultmatum was arrogant and unneccessary and it made her inclined to be contrary about it, on the other hand, Fenris was the closest thing she had to Clan right then, and keeping peace within the Clan was important so sometimes compromises needed to be made. She had pursued blood magic only as a means to unlock the secrets of the magic of arlathan. Now she had the knowledge she had so desperately sought, as well as access to so much more, _and_ when her energy-collecting tree started to bear fruit, she would have the means to augment the magical energy required to actually _run_ the magic of arlathan.

"...Which means that I won't need bloodmagic anyway and I can just discard it as obsolete now," she concluded out loud to herself.

She turned to her housemate, pleased with her conclusion and perfectly willing to meet him on certain things now that her own interests were safeguarded.

"Alright Fenris," she said agreeably. "If you let me keep my spelltree that I worked so hard to develop, I will promise you that I will not use blood magic anymore."

He stared at her with a look of confused disbelief on his face.

"You would give it up... just like that?" he said, sounding astounded.

"Yes?" she said, wondering why he was so surprised by it.

"You would turn your back on its power, the use that you have always defended I'd remind you, just on a whim?" he said in disbelief.

"I have reached the goal that I took the magic up for Fenris," Merrill pointed out sensibly. "Like any tool that has seen its use, it should be put away when no longer needed."

"Give me your word," he demanded sharply.

Merrill looked at him blankly.

"Give me your word that if I allow you your tree of magical abomination, you will no longer use your blood magic," he said insistently. "Swear it with your residence within my home as your forfeit."

_:Creators but he's picky,:_ Merrill thought, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

"Oh very well Fenris," she said. "I swear by the Vir Tanadhal that upon the maturation of my spell tree and the harvest of its energy I will no longer use blood magic."

"At any time, for any reason," he qualified sharply.

"I will no longer use blood magic at any time for any reason," she repeated back at him like a child repeating her lessons by rote. "And if I should break my vow, I acknowledge that I have lost my place at your hearth."

_:Technically it's **my** hearth as I actually own the building,:_ she grumbled to herself.

Fenris looked quite pleased however, so Merrill considered it worth not quibbling over in order to have a little peace in her Clan and not to have to listen to his incessent carping and fussing for a change.

"Now if you're finished so _rudely_ making me swear oaths, Fenris," Merrill grumbled quite tartly. "I have work I'm to do this morning so I'll eat at our hearth and be on my way."

"As you please," he said, as though granting her a favor and Merrill frowned at him for it.

While Pontius was cooking breakfast, Fenris sat at the table looking smugly pleased, and Merrill ignored his smug pleased-ness in favor of reading over the information that Wisdom had gathered with regards to queries she'd made that Wisdom had sent replies to directly into Merrill's new mirror-book.

_:This is ever so much easier than me having to cast my mind over into the Fade to ask questions,:_ Merrill marveled to herself.

All she had to do was make a query with the right parameters and Wisdom would access the knowledge-hub, gather up the information that Merrill had inquired about and send her scrolls of research and articles and books from ancient arlathan having to do with the subject sorted by relevancy.

_:I never thought that I would have the problem of having too much information at my fingertips!_ : she marveled excitedly as she weeded through the different entries regarding her inquiry about sanitation spellwebs and the possibility of a spellweb-redesign for the modern world.

After breakfast, Merrill reluctantly locked her eluvian away in the vault and headed back to the alienage to continue the work she had started the day before. She had to mix up the last batch of steelskin so that the Alienage could hull their last vessel. When she arrived by the treacherous cliffside path to the beach down below and slightly to the side of the Alienage proper, there were about twenty or so young elven lads and lasses from the day before, plus another large gaggle of children and women all crowded round a rag-patchwork that Merrill supposed was intended to make sails.

_:I wonder if Wisdom knows of some ancient arlathan way of magicking up cloth,_ : Merrill mused as she got to work. _:Everyone here could do with some new clothes that aren't more hole than cloth.:_

Any Keeper among the Dalish who had seen her Clan in such a ragged and ill-fed condition would have surely been taken to task by a Keeper Council were they among the Dalish.

_:But to be fair,_ : Merrill allowed. _:Clan's among the Dalish are rarely allowed to grow larger than one hundred people before another mage is found and the Clan is broken off to found a new, smaller Clan to manage the population. This Alienage has several Clan's worth of people all crowded in here with no-where to go and no means to gather their own resources. It would make it much more difficult to be Keeper to without some other solution being found to deal with the challenges.:_

Her mind immediately went to the cold-forge that Merrill had managed to recreate an adaption to that made diamonds out of coal and graphite for her. If the elves could not import raw materials without insanely prohibitive tariffs, perhaps Merrill could research a way to create some of those miraculous elven made-materials with new cold-forges to make up for the lack.

_:And I could probably have the cold-forge on the roof create some anchor stones for a spellweb array to make clean water for the alienage all too,:_ Merrill thought as she mixed in the wet and dry and magicked them together.

Once the last batch of steelskin was done emulsifying (and the elves had finished weaving the wireframe for the last longboat) she joined them in the hot, sticky work of hulling which involved repetitively dipping the strips into the stellskin mixture and layering them on the hull. By the time the last of the steelskin had been used, Merrill was thoroughly sweaty from working in the sun with hot materials, her arms and shoulders and back ached, and she was hungry and thirsty. After bowing politely to the elves of the Alienage, she trudged all the way back across the city and up the hill to Hightown to bask in the relative cool of Fenris' Mansion.

Pontius served her a large lunch and she drank several glasses of chilled water flavored with a squeeze of lime from Antiva. Then she drew herself a cold bath in the laundry sink and plunged in, cooling herself off until she was shivering slightly, then she climbed out, dried off, fetched her Book of Wisdom and hauled her aching muscles to her library for a nice rest while she continued her research into a potential solution for all of the problems the Alienage faced.

Wisdom was very helpful with answering Merrill's questions. The elves of arlathan, it turned out, had created many new types of "made-materials" that was, materials that did not occur in nature, but were instead manufactured in cold-forges by rearranging the cores of one (or several) natural materials. There was a type pf cloth that the elves had called sui'sarii or "watersilk" that was made partly by rearranging the cores of an undesirable black liquid that the Dalish called "stinkwater" which was black, and icky and thoroughly unpleasant, and it's only benefit had seemed to be that it was flammable. The Dalish avoided it, but it seemed that the elves of Arlathan had used it in thier cold-forges to create a great many of their made-materials, everything from water-silk to cold-iron.

Merrill, now thoroughly curious about the watersilk (and hoping to impress the alienage with a light, durable, and potentially weather-proof new cloth that they could use to both make sails for thier new ships and clothe themselves properly with, she made futher inquiries about how the two liquid substances were made. Wisdom explained that when the cores of what Merrill thought of as "stinkwater" were rearranged in a cold-forge and then mixed with a certain alchemical reagent, they combined to make a glue-like substance that, if "pulled" into thin strands before it solidified completely would make a wondrous material that was as light and as smooth as silk, but ten times more tough and durable. Now thoroughly interested, Merrill continued reading about other "made-materials" late into that night, copying down the ingredients (most of which were surprisingly common to harvest) and the spellwebs for her to translate and try making into a cold-forge later on.

_:I don't have a solution to solve all of the problems with building back up the Alienage, at least not yet,:_ Merril thought as she yawned and stripped for bed. _:But I can still work to make their lives a little better at least.:_

* * *

When Merrill wasn't teaching her children, many of whom were excited at the prospect that one of their relatives might tap one of them as an apprentice to work on one of the new ships to learn the trade of a fisherman a sailor or perhaps even a merchant in small goods, she was up to her eartips in ancient elven research with Wisdom. The ships were not dry and thus, the steelskin experiment was not yet declared a success, so they still were not letting Merrill cross through the gate into the Alienage, but it seemed that her efforts on their behalf had earned her some goodwill among the notoriously wary city elves. In anticipation of hopefully earning her way back into their good graces, Merrill had begun to research as much as she could on a wide variety of things, hoping to come across some kind of a solution to the ever-present problem of poverty and their lack of shelter.

The more she investigated things however, the thornier the problem of elven poverty became. They faced barriers on nearly every level; they had no food and until steelskin came along their options for getting boats to even catch their dinner from the sea had been _strictly_ controlled. They had no materials to build with, and any hope they had of getting those materials relied upon money they did not have and had no real chance of earning because the sorts of jobs they were "allowed" to be hired for paid so little that it was all they could do to earn enough to eat with a little left over to pay in for their land-tax. It was like a game of Wicked Grace where nearly every card in the deck was a Song Card and there was very little chance of drawing a Sword!

_:They're poor, in part, because they have no shelter and they have no shelter because they're poor!_ : Merrill thought with a weary exasperation after struggling with the problems for days.

They had no clothes because they couldn't make cloth, but they couldn't make cloth because they couldn't afford animals.

_:And even if they could buy animals, they wouldn't live very long because there's no place to keep them!:_ Merrill thought. _:And eventually they'd probably be forced, by hunger, to eat them anyway.:_

Which left them the same choice that it seemed they always faced, buy what they needed from the shem at ridiculously expensive prices which kept them further in poverty while the shem grew even more wealthy from it. It was a crime, or it ought to be! At least she'd managed to alleviate the ever-present hunger problem by keeping the shem _out_ of the Alienage's new fishing boats.

_:Once they have ships for fishing again they at least won't be starving, but if they don't eat up all of the fish they catch they've no means of storing it away for later... so that would mean a lot of hungry bellies if even one fishing trip goes wrong.:_

A large number of the elves in the Alienage were rather skilled craftsmen and craftswomen, but they couldn't make a decent wage for their work because the shem systematically underpaid for it. Once the elven crafters had bought the materials to make their goods from the shem, the only people they had to sell to were shem, who woul not pay them for what they were worth and in the end even skilled crafters barely made enough to scrape by. It was truly deplorable.

_:And I still don't have a workable solution to the shelter problem,:_ Merrill thought in frustration.

She hadn't known for herself how far the Inner Warrens had been dug into the stone of the Alieange, but she had known that most of the elves lived burrowed away in them, like Dwarves. She realized now that the network of now-collapsed catacombs must have been a great deal more vast than she'd originally thought because she'd heard that most of the elven population of the alienage had needed to clear out due to having no place to live.

"It's too bad I can't just... build a shelter using magic!" Merrill exclaimed aloud in frustration one night after hitting another apparent dead-end in her research.

"Query imprecise," Wisdom informed her helpfully from where she hovered in minature image over teh surface of Merrills three-dimensional workbook. "More specific parameters required."

Merrill paused, taken aback.

" _Can_ I build a shelter using magic?" she asked carefully, surprised.

"Simplistically, yes," Wisdom replied. "However there are over three million different methods devised that could answer your question. You will need to be more precise."

Merrill put a lid on her rising excitement and thought through her next query carefully.

"Wisdom. There are, or were, roughly three-thousand elven men women and children sheltered in the Inner Warrens of the Alienage, which are now collapsed. The elves are not allowed to exceed the boundary marked by the gate at the edge of the Alienage, otherwise the Shem will make a huge fuss. I need a way to not only shelter them, but feed them, give them fresh water, and provide for their needs the way a Keeper should. Did the elves of arlathan have a solution for that?"

"Yes," Wisdom said. "If surface area space is limited, build upward."

Merrill's brow furrowed in puzzlement.

"Show me, please," she said.

A three dimensional image hovered over the surface of Merrill's eluvian-book, showing a large, tall building that grew upwards like a tree only its sides were smooth and they gleamed as though they were made of crystal. The image divided in half, showing what the interior looked like, with many many rooms and corridors riminding Merrill a little bit of the beehive she'd so admired. Tubes shot through the length of it like strands through a shoot of bamboo apparently for the purpose of moving people and things up and down the length of the great structure. Highlighted in red in certain areas were spellweb apparatuses that Merrill didn't know the use of.

"In large cities," Wisdom replied. "Population density within a small area could at times be a problem, even with the relatively limited population in the empire in the era when arlathan was at its peak. This was the solution found by Evanuris Sailiiris. In effect, she took the basic plan for a city built stretching outwards and built it vertically."

Merrill blinked in shock and disbelief. Build a city vertically... right up into the sky?! How was that even possible, it would fall right over!

_:But maybe not if it were made of those ancient elven wonder-materials. Maybe they found clever ways of getting around all of the insurmountable difficulties that modern builders face, such as the brittle nature of stone and the weight of structure._ :

"It looks like a tower built of crystal," Merrill murmured in wonder.

"It is steelglass," Wisdom corrected her. "A made-material twice as strong as steel, weighing seven teilan with a rating of six point five on the eisher hardness scale. Most elven buildings were sheathed in if for its durability and the ease and relative in-expense that it could be produced in a cold-forge with abundant natural materials. Along with substances that could be roughly translated as cold-iron, liquid stone and allbond, it was the most commonly used building material of arlathan."

"What happened to it?" Merrill asked next. "Why arent there any on this in any of the ancient ruins?"

"Unknown," Wisdom replied. "Insufficient data on the subject query."

Merrill paused, cautioning herself not to get too excited and asked the next most important question.

"Is it possible to reproduce these materials today, in this modern era?"

Wisdom paused.

"You have adapted a working model of a cold-forge with one set of parameters that is autonomous and fully functional. You have developed a way to transcribe and adapt the protocols and matrices that form the interior functions of the technologies of ancient arlathan. If appropriate raw materials could be procured, and a new, modern spellweb array written using the system you have developed, as well as a coldforge built capable of supporting the spelweb arrays necessary to produce the made-materials, and sufficient energy required to run them... then yes. It is possible."

Merrill silently exulted to herself.

"However," Wisdom added. "If your query about the materials that have been of interest to you would lead you to next ask whether it would be possible to build a structure such as the one you see displayed before you. That query would be far more problematic."

"I can work with problematic," Merrill said firmly. "Problematic isn't impossible, so I'll take it!"

Thus Merrill started herself on a path of research, running ahead at a furious pace to study, learn and adapt as much as she could so that when the elves of the Alienage asked her "do you have a way to help us?" Merrill would be able to answer "Yes!."


	24. Chapter 24

The longboats for the Alienage had been dried out and cured properly and were about ready to be put upon the ocean to provide the Alienage with food, but unbeknownst to Merrill, who had cloistered herself away with her scholarly projects when she was not busy educating her children, the Alieange had hit upon yet another snag.  One afternoon, as she had finished up the lessons with her young elven students for that day, she was surprised to receive a visitor just as she had finished cleaning up her impromptu classroom in the main floor of Hawke's Mansion. Eist, accompanied by Sanae, peeked in through the doorway as the last of her students wandered out to either head back to the Alienage to work with their parents or find what work they could in the city to feed themselves for that day.

"Andaran atish'an," Merrill greeted, bowing politely to her unexpected company.

"And to you as well, young Merrill," Eist replied with an equal bow in return. "I am certain your students have informed you that the ships that you've helped us to make are due to sail at any day."

Her students had talked of little else, and it had been a challenge to get them all to focus on their lessons with the tantalizing promise of near-unlimited food from the sea to fill the empty bellies of the Alienage (and not line the greedy pockets of the shemlen). Merrill felt a secret bit of pride for being furter needed to help the elves of the Alienage launch thier fishing fleet, as the sails had been something she'd also had a hand in. The Alienage had at first attempted to stitch together the sails from whatever rags could be found to little effect as most of thier usable possessions had been destroyed in the fires, but Fenris had pointed out that Merrill (and he) was in possession of a great deal of coin to make purchases with as well as a network of contacts to purchase from, via House Tethras. The result of his hint had been that a whole pile of fine sailcloth had "mysteriously" made its way to the beachhead one night and had been left waiting there on the morning they were needed most. Merrill had been more than happy to spend her coin on acquiring the sailcloth for the Alienage, even if the dwarves _had_ asked for a fairly large fee for delivering it to the beach without being seen.

"They have indeed," Merrill said, heart giving a little flutter of anticipation at the thought that she had helped the Alienage to have the ability to feed itself as a Keeper should. "I'm sure you're all very excited."

"We are all very _troubled_ ," Sanae said instead, with a sigh.

Merrill looked at them in concern, that had not been the answer she had been expecting.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

"I have my suspicions about the origins of the miraculous gift that arrived precisely as it was needed, former First of the Dalish Elves," Sanae stated with a very significant look at Merrill that said she hadn't been at all fooled by Merrill's attempted secrecy. "And if my suspicions are correct, then I will speak for the Alienage, or what's left of it, and say that the mysterious appearance is cause for gratitude and celebration."

Merrill didn't bother to hide her smile. She saw little trouble in acknowledging the oblique expression of gratitude so long as the matter was not stated _openly_. The reason for the polite fiction was that if the Alienage were to _officially_ know where the gift had come from, it would incur a debt to Merrill, which it must see to repaying her for, gift or not. This was why Merrill had asked that the sailcloth be delivered in secret. Still, it was nice to hear a thank-you.

"However, the shem are as cunning as they are greedy," Sanae continued. "A certain Noble House on the Kirkwall Coincil has the right to assess fees for every ship sailing in and out of any harbor in Kirkwall. This fee is levied by the discretion of that Noble House. As soon as it seemed as though our ships would be ready to sail, the Alienage harbor had an assessor at our gate demanding that the Alienage and its captains pay the appropriate taxes to commission the ships and that they would be resonsible to pay the "mast fee."

"Mast fee?" Merrill questioned. "What's that?"

Over her time in Kirkwall, mostly by her dear friend Varric's patient instruction, Merrill had gotten better at figuring out the intricasies of money and tithes and taxes, but sometimes the strange things that the shemlen found to put a tax on still surprised her.

"A tax levied on all ships of city origin, assessed by how many masts a given ship is in possession of," Eist explained patiently. "It was found, by the tax collectors, to be the most efficient way for the assessors to asses a tax as almost all ships had masts, and the larger the ship the more masts they had, and thus, likely, the larger the cargo they could move and the more they would be able to pay in tax. The alienage had previously avoided this tax by simple virtue of the sorts of boats we had used to fish with. we had been limitaed to small, simple fishing boats without mast or sail, powered by the strength of arms of our oarsmen. It seems that in our ambition, we have wrought too well, for our new longboats are large enough that they would require the aid of wind to propel them, thus we are subject to the mast tax... which we have no means of paying."

Merrill opened her mouth to immediately offer to pay the tax out of her own pocket but Sanae seemed to read her intent and interrupted.

"The Alienage would seek any possible _alternative_ measures that would not incur a heavy debt upon a people who seek to feed themselves."

It was her way of reminding Merrill that if she offered to pay out of pocket, the Alienage would be indebted to her no matter how vehemently she might protest otherwise.

"Something involving a team effort of some sort," Eist added. "Would avoid any complications that a monetary debt might incur."

:So they can get away with writing a work of labor off as a team effort, but anthing I might use money or goods for outright would incur a debt,: Merrill understood. :I do wish things with coins and taxes and debts and obligations weren't so complicated.:

In the city, however where coin and things of measurable value were kept careful track of, one might as well wish for the moon. It was simply how they lived, and if Merrill was to style herself as one of them, she would need to be more adept at their ways. Merrill paused and thought for a very long moment. She had been putting in many hours every night to studying the ancient elven magics with Wisdom, and they had nearly perfected a system that could reliably and accurately translate the parameters that the ancient magics had used into a viable workaround for the different climate of magical energy that was the normal stat for the current era. It _did_ need some outside augmentation for energy, however, there was a variety of mechanical means that could be used to aid in this augmentation. Pus, there was Merrill's growing spell-tree. Once it had reached full maturation in just a few more weeks, she would get to harvest it for the first time and thus, she would have what should, essentially, be a whole different, alternate supply of what would amount to lyrium, to help her power her renovated magical systems.

"When you say any possible alternative measures," Merrill asked carefully. "Do you truly mean that?"

Sanae nodded gravely.

"These ships represent our viable food supply, and they will rot in the harbor unless that Noble family is satisfied," Eist replied.

"Give me a few days," Merrill said decisively. "I will do everything I can think of to alleviate the Alienage's distress over this."

Eist and Sanae exchanged a long, speaking look. Sanae shrugged as though to say "why not?" and Eist smiled with a slightly triumphant gleam in his eyes.

"We look forward to seeing whatever solution you might come up with to the mast-fee problem," Eist cackled. "We will accept help even by a cat's paw. If the solution is, shall we say innovatively _elv-hen_ , as the Dalish say, then... let it not be said we elves of the Alienage will lag behind our dear forest cousins."

Eist had just given her carte blanche to use magic. In fact, he had all but said that such was the reason that they had come to her for a "solution." At last! It seemed that the city elves of the irkwall Alienage were willing to be more reasonable and accept the open use of magic within their lives. Merrill looked back at them with surprise and delight written on her face. Sanae looked wryly resigned and said

"Try not to be _too_... innovative. We still have that silly Mother Beneficence and her ilk in the Chantry to deal with. She's already on a tear about how we elves ought to be grateful for whatever small help we are given, we don't need her shouting about blasphemy and abominations as well."

"Right!" Merrill said, nodding firmly. "I'll start on it right away!"

She walked back to Fenris' Mansion through te streets of Hightown with her head stuffed full of half-formed plans and vague notions of what might be made to work. Pontius greeted her with a late lunch in the kitchen and Fenris was already there, finishing up his portion.

"Maker on a mule, Witch," he sighed when he saw her.

He was already shaking his head and she hadn't even greeted him!

"Oh what's the matter with you now, Fenris?" Merrill demanded, irritated.

"You have that look in your eye," he said.

"What look?" she asked.

"That vague, dreamy expression that says you're about to do something weird with your abominable magic. _That_ sort of look," he replied, sipping his soup.

"I'm not using blood magic anymore, so you can't call it abominable," she quibbled, sitting down to her own bowl of soup and buttering a roll.

Technically, she acknowledge to herself, he could call it abominable seeing as she was in fact, working alongside a Spirit, but he did not need to know that. She'd never hear the end of it.

"And speaking of, how is my spell tree looking today?" she asked, turning her head to gaze out the window that opened out onto the back courtyard.

The sound of bees buzzed in the air as Merrill had set up a nice little beehive to pollinate her plants for her in one of the back corners (and she liked honey). To encourge the bees to set up shop, Merrill had gotten rid of the useless vines that had overgrown the walls and fixtures of the back garden and replaced them with seed-modded climbing rose-vines of her own choosing. All along the walls and pergola of the back courtyard, excepting her herb garden and the special area for her spell-tree, there were fountains of healthy, brambly roses that she had force-grown to keep her bees nearby. The lovely flowers that covered every inch of the walls and the pergola kept the bees quite happy to stay mostly nearby to collect their nectar.

Over the last few weeks, with gentle encouragement from Merrill, the spell-tree had grown from a shoot to a sapling to a small, tree with thin-sized outreaching branches. It was beautiful to look at. The bark glowed golden, like the last rays of sunlight just before the sun set, the leaves were edged with brilliant pin-points of light like tiny stars that moved through the veins of the translucent leaves of the plant. Main veins, like small rivers of light flowed up and down the trunk of the tree, which was now almost as big around as her waist. Another week or two, and the energy threshold would be reached that would send the tree into its first flowering, that would means that the energy-cycle had reached the point where it would produce the fruit to be harvested.

_:I'm glad I didn't disassemble or re-purpose that cold-forge after I was done making those blood-diamonds,:_ Merrill thought in a pardonable bit of self congratulations.

She and Wisdom, in anticipation of the first harvest of energy-pods from the spell-tree, had developed a safe and effective storage device for the raw energy that the tree would produce, making it possible for the "energist" as Merrill had decided to call it, to be used safely by anyone. Once the pods of magical energy produced by the spell-tree had been harvested (and before they could become unstable) Merrill would feed the magical energy into a special sort of magical device akin to a cold-forge that would bond that energy into the core-structure of a diamond in much the same magical process that Merrill had used to create her bloodstones.

_:Only these will be energist stones,:_ she thought almost a-shiver with anticipation. _:They could act as magical power-sources to feed the renovated spellwebs for... for anything!:_

She felt very much like a new mother hen, brooding over her precious golden egg, only _this_ egg would be worth so much more than mere gold. This egg would be the source of near-limitless possibilities!

_:Just think!:_ she thought happily. _:All of the benefits of lyrium without having to buy it from the Dwarves or risk lyrium poison_!:

It was this new source of magic, one that did not entirely require the presence of a mage beyond the initial spell-work, that Merrill was going to be developing. In fact, the Alienage's plea for help with regards to their mast-fee problem had given her the first chance at developing a brand new application for her work!

Fenris cleared his throat and looked at her very pointedly.

"I do not know precisely what it is you are researching in the library that has you there every spare moment," he said looking at her with his eyes narrowed in suspicion. "But it had better be in line with our agreement."

_:Really, he takes every chance he can to remind me,:_ Merrill thought in exasperation.

He really did. He brought it up at _least_ once a day, that Merrill had promised him that she would not practice blood magic or he would kick her out of the abode they shared. Merrill was disinclined to be defensive about it, now that she had her ancient magics restoration project to work on, and a viable alternative to the requirement of the extra power offered by bloodmagic. He could natter on about it all day if he wanted to, if she didn't need it, she wasn't going to use it and that was that.

"Yes yes, everything's in line Fenris," she assured him, mind already thinking through partially developed notions on how one was to get a ship to move without masts. She wandered off to the library to work on her new project.

_:The Dalish have our Halla to pull our arravels along, but I don't suppose it's possible to make some sort sea-halla to do the job, and one wouldn't likely find any of the fish very amenable to the work,:_ she thought to herself.

Wisdoms' book lay open on the table with its three-dimensional workspace up, scroll-screens filled with ancient texts and half-finished research projects written in hard-light hovering over its surface. Wisdom herself was currently out of her usual position in the house on the other side of the Fade comprised of Luciens wards. She had traveled to the knowledge-hub, in person, to speak with others of her kind. Apparently there was something of a disturbence in the Spirit-World, some kind of big to-do that the Spirit was not willing to speak about with Merrill.

_:I wonder what it could be...:_ Merrill mused as she spread out her holographic workspace a little more and considered to herself whether she should go ahead and do as Wisdom had suggested she do and forge a larger, dedicated tabletop-eluvian. The Spirit had told her that any mage who truly called him or herself a mage had forged their own eluvian work-surface which they used to organize their various ongoing projects access a larger information hub for research from the privacy of their own homes, assist them in running complex magical computation and a variety of other functions. It was tempting to have a larger work surface so that she could do even more research and projects, but Merrill was currently _already_ working on three major projects at the moment and she still lacked the magical resources that would be needed to forge a larger dedicated eluvian.

_:The most important project I have right now is all of the work I'm puttin in on researching a way to fix up the Alienage.:_

Merrill was looking into the cure for the Alienege housing situation. It was a tangled, thorny problem, but she was making steady progress with it, at least on the theoretical side. There were a lot of issues to address before a project of the scope and magnitude that would be required that would address all of the Alienage's current and future needs could be realistically proposed. Raw materials: where would the building supplies come from? Logistics: how would they get to the build-site? Man-power: could she get the elves on board with such a risky and unconventional, not to mention, _magical_ , solution? Method: how did she propose to tackle the basic question of how such a tall building could ever even be built in the first place? There were seven fudamental challenges that would need to be adressed make living inside of the building possible and they would need to be solved before the plans could be finished. Wisdom had laid them out clearly.

Materials: they would need to be strong enough to whether what nature could throw at them, but light enough that they wouldn't cause the structure to sink into the ground, and also they needed to be of a sort that wouldn't require a great deal of space spent supporting the weight of the structure. Mobility: People needed a way to move quickly or at least very efficiently from place to place withing the building. Heat: she had to control the interior temperature or the sunlight would bake them inside the structure. Speed of logistics; she needed a way to build the structure quickly and with far greater efficiency than any building before, because once construction began, they would be working against a timer, that timer being how long would it take before the humans started making a fuss. Wind-push: the structure needed a way to negate the sizable force of the winds off the Storm Coast so that the top floors in the building did not sway like the top of a tree. Rigidity vs flexibility: if she made the structure _too_ rigid, it would not be able to adapt to environmental catastrophe. Wards: she needed a way to write a vast, inter-meshed system of them because there were a lot of basic things the denizens of the proposed structure were going to need that they probably could not get in any other way.

_:It's a lot of work, even with my being able to raid the solutions that have already been found in Arlathan!:_ Merrill thought to herself.

Wisdom had stated quite bluntly that making a building of the size and height that the Alienage was going to need to house present and future residents out of stone was _utterly_ impossible. Stone was dense and heavy, and it required a lot of support to build upward. The taller a structure was, the thicker and more massive the blocks of stone would be required to support every additional story built on top until the point where there would be no bottom floors, just stone blocks. The ancients had developed a solution for this problem using steel tubes or cables and an elven material that could be roughly translated to mean "liquid-stone." The liquid-stone was a mixture rather a lot like the steel-skin that Merrill was already familiar with. It was comprised of a mixture of volcanic ash and lime and often times an aggregate of sand. When wet and dry ingredients were mixed together, they formed a thick, muddish, grey, quasi-liquid that could be poured into molds which would then dry out and set, leaving behind a solid stone. The ancients had discovered that the liquid stone alone was not stable enough for tall buildings... but when they added in a sort of skeletal structure comprised of geometrically-arranged tubes of cables of a material they called (roughly translated) cold-iron, which was an elven made-material forged in a cold-forge made of carbon and iron, the skeleton would lend the stone the support it needed to maintain its integrity. The combination of cold-iron skeleton and liquid-stone poured moldings could enable a flexibility with regards to building that had not been seen in the world since the days of ancient Arlathan. With the matter of the weight of the structure taken care of, the next concern was the structure itself.

There was a danger that something that was made to be very tall would be pushed right over by the strength of the wind. In fact there was currently a "test" model of the proposed Alienage building that was wobbling side to side like an overlarge jelly being pushed by illusory streams of wind. Wisdom claimed that the problem of wind-push had already been addressed in the past, and apparently the answer had been to take those skeletal beams of cold-steel and move them outward to create as sort of structural exoskeleton that was supposedly more stable than an interior skeletal structure. Thus, Merrill's original thought of a single tall building with a sort of spinal cord in the center of steel-skin beams had been modified. Instead of a single, hexagonal-shaped spire, the design had been modified to a round cluster of hexagonal-shaped spires with cold-iron exoskeletons that had liquid-stone skins and were sheathed in steelglass. The geometric structures holding the beams together were geodesic in design, allowing for better distribution of weight. Furthermore the skeletal beams and liquid-stone joins and the seams of the steelglass, and everything that had to be joined together an secured firmly in place were all held together, not by rivets or welds or nails, but by some miracle-material that Merrill had translated as "allbond."

Allbond was part of the solution to one of the _other_ problems that Wisdom had laid out; time. The longer the project dragged on, the more likely it was that some form of outside interference from the shem, likely in the form of some intolerant doctrine from the Chantry or just the irritating Kirkwal Council of Nobles putting a stop to the whole thing, would be laid on the Alienage project. Thus it was imperative that once the build had been started, that it be concluded so quickly that the shem wouldn't have the time to put up a serious objection. It needed to be finished and brought online so quickly that it would essentially be a _fait accompli_. Even with the steel skeleton and the liquid stone to bind it, if the workers had to forge every joint into place it would take far too long to build. Allbond was a binding agent that bonded two solid substances together on the core-level by magic. Essentially, it tricked two separate components into thinking that the other was part of itself. It would cut out an enormous amount of time in the time it would take to build something, however Merrill hadn't quite figured out the trick of how she was going to get her perfectly ordinary, non-magical workers to manipulate a substance the required magic to activate.

The other solution to the matter of time and the speed it would take to set up a building was something that seemed so simple after it had been suggested, that Merrill was surprised no-one had thought of it before. That was to build part of the building somewhere off-site and move the pieces in as they were needed. Normally, such an undertaking would have been impossible; there were no teams of oxen strong enough to pull a section of building into place, and nothing that could lift it off the ground. The ancients had had a solution. First, the Kirkwall Alienage was right on the harbor, so Merrill could havebuild-sites that would make up pre-made sections of the building off-site all up and down the coast and then simply bring the pre-made sections in as they were needed. It helped that the proposed building was much like a beehive in that one section was structurally an exact copy of all of the others repeated over and over. This homogeny would greatly simplyfy the building process. Wisdom had pulled up the core-designs for a floating barge made of a water-proof porous material that floated on water. The enormous sections of the building could be loaded on to the floating hard-foam barge and towed into the build-site by boats, to then be offloaded and slipped into their predetermined slots, then cemented in place with allbond. This had led Merrill to the natural question of, once the building got off the first story, how did anyone propose to move something so big? Ropes and pulleys could only do so much.

Wisdom had shown Merrill an ancient technology that could and possibly would, change _everything_. It wasn't huge, in fact it was very small, small enough to fit inside the palm of her hand with space left over. they/it was formed out of carbon in a cold-forge with a spellweb ward written into the spell-core of every piece. What a single piece of the wondrous ancient elven development lacked in size it made up for in numbers and the astounding amount of flexibility it was capable of. The wondrous devices (for they came in a set) were made of two basic components; a round, elongated, tube-like part that came to soft, rounded points at both ends and a mutli-faceted little orb, about the size of a large marble, that dimpled in gently on every face. The soft points of the round tubes touched gently into the indentations on the faceted orbs and were held there by a field of magical force that flowed from point to indent, forming a temporarily unbreakable bond of magical force. Like a child building with blocks, this bond could be broken and re-formed at will, causing each separate part to disassemble and reassemble into shapes that were only limited by the imagination of the person manipulating the force-bonds. There was no need for rope or levers to lift and pull things into place, no need for wheels or sleds to move things around, the individual tube-components could spin in their axis like the tubes on a conveyor belt, making it easy work to slide even the heaviest thing into place with a gentle push. Bulky and heavy objects could be stair-stepped upward by the clever manipulation of the little peices to move and lever and object about. Not only that but the wonder-devices could be spread out into a net-formation which could flexibly take whatever shape was needed and when thin sheets of flexible steelskin attached were to them that overlapped in the same manner as roof-shingles on a house, they could form a pour-mold that liquid-stone could be poured in to then removed to let the stone set in its new shape.

_:I still haven't solved the pesky problem of just how I'm supposed to **power** the little wonders,:_ Merrill thought with irritation and regret as she looked over at her own little set of them.

As soon as she had seen them, she'd _had_ to make a set of her very own to play with. So, she had adapted the spellweb design using the parameters of her still-experimental workaround functions for modern times, and used Lucien's hearth to cold-forge a set of about twenty of the bead-sized wonders for her to try out. They worked just as promised, they could form about any structural shape that her imagination could conceive of... sadly there was one major limitation to the little devices as it stood currently. Unlike the magical climate of elvhenan, the little construction-beads could not simply absorb magic from the ambient world's field to power their spellwebs and help them continue to function. After a time, they ran out of energy, and unless Merrill fed them more magical power, they would become inert and inoperative. It was a major set back, for she knew that if the building was going to be completed at all, they were going to need these devices, the elves simply lacked the tools to do the job any other way.

_:Maybe when I have my energist, I can use that, somehow,:_ Merrill thought hopefully.

In anticipation of the day when she would be able to use them without any trouble, Merrill had pre-emptively renamed them from some loooong-ass elven word that translated roughly to "the devices that we use to build with" to a short and simple "tektek," so called because of the soft clickety clickety noise they made when they collapsed into a pile of pieces before rebuilding from one shape to another.

_:I suppose that's a problem for another day,:_ she thought. _:On top of the speed of the build and the need for cold-forges for all of the made-materials, there's also a problem with logistics of even **getting** the materials we would need to build with in the first place!:_

She'd need volcanic ash and lime for the liquid stone, iron for the cold-iron, possibly graphite or coal for all of the materials made from carbon unless she could find a reliable source of stinkwater, she would need also a lot of raw quartz. She could get a large portion of it from the sand and sandstone that made up the bedrock of Kirkwall (which was why Kirkwall had been a quarry in ancient times) but it likely would not be enough to make the massive amounts of steelglass that would be required to clad the surface of the building in steelglass. Merrill knew that Dwarves would have the materials she needed. She was aware that she could pay gold to the Dwarves, probably to the Merchant's Guild or even Orzammar itself, to purchase the materials, however, she as-yet lacked a method for getting the purchased materials from the place where she had bought them to the place where she needed them to be processed through the cold-forges (that she had not even built yet) so that she could build with them. She knew that if she tried to move all of those heavy raw materials about with ships, it would double or triple the ships she would need to build to move them, but moving the raw materials would not only slow down construction but also... the shem would start poking their noses in, demanding tariffs for this and exorbitant fees for that. Merrill was plotting to herself about possibly finding a way to create something like an ancient-style eluvian, the kind that could move something instantaneously from one point to another, to move the goods.

_:So far, I'm simply too limited in magical power and in the sorts of materials that they used in ancient Arlathan to build such wonders.:_

Wisdom had told her that under current conditions, Merrill's little dream of even a _limited_ eluvian, tied to a single point to point transferal, was utterly unfeasible, if not impossible. Merrill, however, was not one to give up at the first bit of a challenge. She'd put the project on the back-burner for the moment in interest of other things... but she hadn't given up on it.

_:If I can create a powerful ward-web for my spell-tree with fairly small prewritten webs and the power of my own bloodstones alone, think of what I might accomplish with the boost in power from the harvest of my spell-tree and perhaps some better, more powerful anchor-stones,:_ Merrill thought.

Her dream of ressurecting the best of the ancient technologies of elvhenan wasn't entirely out of reach, she just needed to be patient and keep working at it.

As for the remaining challenges of mobility, that was, the ability to get her people safely up and down the many floors of the proposed building in a timely manner. Stairs were _right out_ for the most part. A person might realistically be expected to climb two or three stories of steps, perhaps even five or six (though they'd have to be very fit to make that trip every day!) but there was proposed to be somewhere along the lines of twenty or so floors in this new Alienage that Wisdom was proposing. Living on the top floor would be impossible, it would be like asking someone to climb a mountain every day just to get to the bottom! Wisdom had proposed two solutions, neither of which Merrill thought was likely to be very well received, at least currently. One solution was to put people in a big metal box, hang that box on a rope and trust that it would not snap while people went hurtling upwards and downwards at great speed. The second proposition was even less likely; Merrill was somehow supposed to build into the Alieange a system of a sort of magical tube-structure, lined with wardwebs, that would use magic to make people weightless and able to float so that they could flow up and down these "levitation shafts" like bits of food in the veins of a bamboo stalk.

_:Don't think that would go over at all well, and that isn't even getting started on all of the other systems of spellwebs that are going to be required.:_

Merrill had asked Wisdom to compile a list of all of the different and interconnected spellwebs of wards that were going to be required to run all of the functions in the Alienage and when she'd gotten a look at the thing she'd nearly called a halt to the whole project just based in the sheer size and number of all to the interlocking spell-web arrays tat were going to be needed to run the Alienage and keep it habitable, much less provide all of the comforts she desired to grant her people. Which rather led to one of the last few major challenges to the proposed Alienage design. Heat. Sheathing the building in steelglass would allow light in, making a structure that could feel tight and enclosed feel bright and inviting and that what she wanted for her people. In addition, the proposed steelglass panels were going to be needed for another reason; they would supply the Alienage with the additional energy it was going to need to run the wardwebs by harvesting the energy of the sun and even the kintetic energy of wind-push. Merrill would simply take the development she'd made for the cold-forge on the roof and write it large all over the surface of the proposed Alienage-building and use the energy she harvested to keep the endless cycle of wardwebs running. Sadly, there was a slight snag. The steelglass needed for the outside of the building to power the wards needed for the inside of the building, Wisdom had explained to her, would heat up the air of the inside of the building like a stone bread-oven. She needed a way to control the interior temperatures. Wisdom had two ways, one was a made-material that would insulate the glass and prevent the transfer of heat from the outside into the interior, the other was by building in wardwebs that could heat and cool currents of air flowing into and throughout the Alienage.

_:And those air temperature wards aren't even barely the **beginning** of whats needed!:_ Merrill thought in dismay, looking at the massive homework project that Wisdom had given her.

Not only would air need to be heated and cooled to control the interior temperature, but a huge network of sanitation wards would be needed to process and dispose of waste, provide washing and drinking water to the denizens of the alienage. The interior would need to be lit, somehow, so that people were not stumbling around in the dark. There would need to be some sort of security wards put into place to help keep her people safe and to guard against the danger of a fire breaking out. Working out those wards, adapting them from spellwebs that the ancients had already perfected, was the task that Merrill had been devoting herself to for the last few weeks, while she and Wisdom worked together on her proposal for a new Alienage.

_:All of this work and I don't even know if they're going to say yes,:_ she thought with misgiving. _:They'll probably laugh me right out of Kirkwall.:_

"Which brings me to this new project," Merrill muttered to herself.

In order to have even the _slightest_ hope of convincing the people of the Alienage, no matter _how_ desperate they were for shelter, to go along with what looked like (even to her, most days) absolute madness, Merrill was going to have to convince them that she could make good on her promises and find solutions for the problems that the Alienage faced. Essentially, Eist and Sanae was testing her, yet again. The task they had given her was to test her ability to provide the innovative solutions that the Alienage was going to need to get around all of the roadblocks that the shemlen were likely to put in their way as the Kirkwall elves tried to claw their way out of poverty. They had to feel confident that they could trust her to make good on whatever promises she made and that she could provide the answers they needed.

"So then," she murmured to herself. "Just how does one make a sailing-ship to sail without sails?"

The smart thing to do would be to ask herself the same question she had always asked herself when she needed to parse out a solution to the ancient elven magics within the eluvian. That question was 'what is (said problem) actually designed to do? What's it's end-goal?'. That question generally got rid of a lot of the mental path-wearing that came with trying to unravel the complications of the spellweb itself by setting her up to look at the result and work backwards.

"A sail is designed to catch the wind," she answered herself. "But it only does that as a way to push the boat forward. Same with oars rowing in the water, I guess. So the end-goal is to find a way to move the vessel forward without relying on sails and masts for the city to tax."

She puzzled over the conundrum for a while. She didn't think that trying to harness a sea-creature to move it along was going to be at all feasible, and hitching it up to a dragon was right out, it would burn the boat to cinders! Rowing with oars would require more man-power than the Alienage could feasibly supply at the moment and they needed the food that the boats were going to provide desperately and quickly. Merrill thought of all of the _traditional_ ways she knew of to get something from place to place, but none of them seemed to fit quite right.

"So I can't pull it along, and we can't paddle it about. Maybe... give it a tail like a fish?"

The idea of a ship with a tail sloshing about was a funny thought, but the problem was that even if she _could_ get some kind of mechanical tail built onto the back of a ship, they would still need probably a large crew of people to move it and they would have no feasible way to steer the ship because the tail was in the spot were they rudder is supposed to go.

_:And a ship with side-fins would just look silly,:_ she thought to herself.

Merrill sat down to have another hard think about it. Most of her knowledge about ships came from aravells of her people, and those rolled about on land and were mostly pulled by halla, so that was a dead end.

"Although," Merrill paused a glimmer of an idea beginning to form when her ponderings triggered a childhood memory.

It had been when Merrill had been growing up in Sabrae Clan, under the tutelage of her Keeper Marethari, and first learning to perfect her control of magic. Her Keeper had been surprised and delighted to discover that her young First had a surprisingly powerful gift for force-type magic, spells like stonefist and tempest, and veil-strike had come naturally to her (though Merrill did get the sense that Merethari had been privately a little disappointed that her young First had not displayed any natural ability as a Healer). Force-spells, once the basics were learned, were fairly straightforward but they were somewhat exclusive to a mage needing to posses a powerful innate magical affinity.

Merrill had mastered the basics and had been diligently working on her control as her Keeper had instructed her. Fine control combined with strength, her Keeper had said, would make her truly a force to be reckoned with, and so Merrill had set herself to her exercise with a will. It had been while she had been practicing her fine control with her force spells one hot afternoon, that the Clan's two mischief-makers, Mahariel and Tamlen, had come around to the young (and still quite gullible) Merrill. They had come from the halla-keeper, they'd claimed, who had told them to pass on a message to Merrill. The halla were out at the field, they'd said and the halla-keeper needed an aravell pushed over to hitch up a few of the halla to, and that Merrill should move the arravell up to the top of that steep hill over there. When Merrill had questioned them why they didn't just drag it up there themselves, they'd replied that it was too heavy for even a pair of ten-year-olds to manage. When she'd then asked why the Keeper hadn't done it, they'd replied that she was very busy and that Merrill could use her new mastery of force-magic to manage such a simple task. Merrill, utterly flattered with the thought that her Keeper had assigned her such an important task had not thought to question the two trouble-maker's story more closely.

_:And that wasn't the last time either,:_ Merrill thought with a fond headshake.

Her relationship with the two energetic troublemakers had continued to exasperate the Clan throughout the years, and despite the sorts of messes that they'd often dragged her into, Merrill had considered them her two best friends. It had been that close relationship that had prompted her to be so stubborn about fixing the eluvian and finding Tamlen.

When Merrill had asked them how Marethari had suggested that they get the huge arravell all the way to the top of a fairly steep hill, Tamlen had said that she should just use her magic to lift it. Merrill had then explained to him that that would be impossible for her right then, and Mahariel had quickly interrupted with the claim that her Keeper had left it up for Merrill to solve. She's always been fairly good with puzzles and the like, so Merrill had decided that it was possible. Instead of using her magic to stonefist-lift an impossibly heavy object upwards, it might be possible to instead redirect a pure force-spell to _push_ the object along.

Tamlen and Mahariel had exchanged delighted, anticipatory looks and they had all climbed into the back of the arravell. Tamlen and Mahariel had taken hold of the harness-yolk that the halla were usually hitched to that guided the direction of the aravell and pulled it up to the front seat, saying that they would keep it going in the right direction. Merrill had braced herself against the main sail-mast, facing backwards, gathered up a large share of her mana and formed an open-ended force spell pointed outwards from her cupped hands. With a great magical heave she had unleashed the force spell. The release of the force-spell had thrown her violently against the mast as the undirected force of the spell had blasted backwards with all the power required to lift a heavy boulder. The arravell had shot forwards like an arrow unleashed from a bow. Tamlen had been knocked off balance by the sudden movement and tumbled from the front bench. Mahariel had fared better, managed to brace himself and kept hold of the guide-yolk, thus he had been able to keep the arravel from veering off-course when the arravell had propelled at breakneck speed up the hill. To their continuing misfortune, Merrill's spell had worked all too well for the arravel not only made it to the top of the steep hill, it had just enough momentum to push it up over the top... and the arravel then started its downward descent, gaining even greater momentum as it went along.

No doubt Tamlen and Mahariel had begun their trick with the thought of the fun feeling they would enjoy at the speed of the arravel as it rolled down the hill. They had already tried to come up with similar means over the course of the summer to enjoy the feeling of speed but this trick, by far, had been the most daring. Merrill's spell knocking her backwards and caused her to hit her head on the mast hard enough to make her dizzy and she'd fortunately fallen into the bottom of the empty arravel instead of tumbling out the back and breaking her neck. Mahariel's shouts of fear as he'd desperately tried to keep control of the guide-yolk on the arravel so that it wouldn't tip over on its side and potentially break had roused the Clan. Keeper Marethari had adeptly slowed the arravell with magic, rescuing the arravell and its remaining cargo, before any further damage was done. The three children, two injured and one frightened nearly witless, had been collected and their health ascertained... and _then_ the inquisition had begun.

After the initial half panic and concern for their health was over with, the Clan hahren, seeing two known trouble-makers and a lot of potential trouble, had gotten on to the business of inquiring just what, _precisely_ , had happened. Hahren Paivel had gotten the story out of the three of them, and Marethari (and the rest of the adults of the Clan) had not _at all_ been amused. Aravells were an important, and magically _expensive_ , resource of the Clan, and those two pranksters had jeopardized one. Furthermore, they had put the First in danger. To top it off, Marethari's name had been assumed and they had abused the trust that that name represented. In short, Tamlen and Mahariel had been in very big trouble. At the end of it they'd _all_ had sore bottoms, Merrill as well for not investigating a suspicious situation more closely. While she'd been a victim of thier trick, she'd been punished for going along with it as well because as First and future Keeper of the Clan, Merrill was held to higher standards and had been expected to act with greater judgement and discernment. While she'd not ever had much occasion to use the knowledge, Merrill had never forgotten that a force-spell that could knock an object onto a particular trajectory, as in the stonefist spell, could _also_ be used to push something at the source of that point forward by blasting backwards as she had seen with the arravell and her spell.

"I'm sure I could design a spellweb that would make a constantly cycling, single-direction force-spell that could be made to turn on and off again," Merrill thought.

In fact, it would probably be the simplest thing she had ever designed a spellweb to do. The force spell was a single action. She would just need to make the spellweb over-draw at it's end-node, would be programmed to cycle right back through the spellweb's source-node at the beginning. The spell at the end would feed in enough power to kick-start the activation of the source node to draw off the energy needed to power the force-spell on an endless loop, then add a modifier-subfunction spellweb that could intercede when activated to cut off the cycle thus powering down the force-spell. Simple.

"Before I can write the force-spell spellweb however, I'll need some kind of device that will act as the focus for the force-spell, to point the force in the right direction so that the object is pushed along by outward facing force," she muttered, drawing out a concept for the proposed device in her works-pace while simultaneously pulling up a few blank work-boards to write out her spellweb equations and pulling up information on previously used ancient spellwebs that were similar in concept... no sense in re-inventing the wheel after all.

Merrill worked for several hours on her project for, as anything it seemed, it became more complicated the deeper into it she went. First a device that would emit the force in a single direction had to be designed, then a spellweb that had controlled gradients of force had to be carefully designed, then a physical residence for the spellwebs that would allow for some flexibility while still keeping the spellwebs running cleanly had to be conceived of and designed, and last, since the person captaining the ships would not be a mage most likely, she had to figue out a sort of interface device that could mechanically allow for the manipulation of the parameters of the pre-written spellwebs.

Merrill quickly discovered that a single force-blast bursting out from the force-emitters was not at all what was needed. First of all, it would result in injury because of the same reasons that she, Tamlen and Mahariel had been injured, which was the sudden jolt of force tended to knock people about and cause injury. She had to design as series of spellwebs, interconnected ones, that would enable the force-emitters she'd designed to emit a _range_ of force-push, starting out with a soft push and growing to the sort of powerful shove that would get a vessel moving up to a speed comparable to being pushed along by a sail in a good wind. Not only that, but the spellweb would need to have a way to be controlled by a person who would not have any magic themselves, which also meant that the spellweb was going to need to be powered by magic without the intercession of a mage. Merrill was going to take a gamble and bank upon her as-yet unharvested energist power-stones to provide the spellweb array with the magical energy it was going to need to run, otherwise they would need to be a mage aboard the ship to feed the spellweb with a continual low-lever stream of mana to run the array unless Merrill wanted to spend the rest of her life making a continual supply of bloodstones.

The spellweb array was a system of interconnected spellwebs and not just a single spellweb, so Merrill had to create a compact design of a "brain" or central unit that would make the changes demanded by the interface to the ongoing loop of the spellweb array. Since it was cyclic in nature, rather like a beating heart pumped blood through the bloodstream, Merrill designed the spellwebs to be written on a set of three constantly spinning disks with grooves cut into the surfaces that contained the information of each individual closed-loop spellweb written along a line burned into the groove. The power source would sit in a bracket in the center of the disks and would power each spellweb by having an arm with little energy transmitting nubs that could be activated or deactivated shoot currents of energy into the source nodes of each grids spellweb when that spell-set needed to be activated. Each disk could run as many as sixty-four spellwebs in a single cycle, and the layered disks multiplied that by three and each one was designed to interact on pre-programed sets with one another so all in all, Merrill had to pat herself on the back for a, fairly clunky, but innovative solution to the limitations she'd faced with making several different set of spellweb arrays designed to operate simultaneously. Designing a closed system that could accommodate changes to the power structure was easier thought than accomplished. Merrill spent half of her time in researching how the ancients had managed the feat and copying or finding ways to adapt their techniques to her own purposes. It involved a lot of balancing simulations on her spellwebs designs. It was slow, painstaking, often frustrating, work as Merrill tended to fail a lot before she came up with something that worked but Merrill tried not to let it get her down.

_:After all, I could be forced to forge every one of these trial spellwebs before I found out it was a failure or a success and I would have wasted days of work and a lot of resources otherwise, which I would have had to have done if I didn't have Wisdom's book.:_ So as far as she was concerned even if it was frustrating, it was still an improvement over how she _had_ been doing things up until then.

Once she had her spellweb arrays balanced, and a good, hardy, well-shielded engine to encase it in had been designed, she needed only to work out the last part.

The final challenge in her ship-mover project was to work out a way for an un-magical captain to be able to interface with and control the various outputs of a magical spellweb array that would control the forward momentum of the ship. She tried and dismissed several ideas at first, including a fancy interface that used a three-dimensional display hovering over an eluvian-board written in hardlight that had apparently been _all_ the rage in ancient Arlathan.

_:If I tried to present them with a display that has magic hovering at them right in their faces the sailors would all take one good look at it and promptly reject it outright,:_ Merrill thought to herself as she took started on the design for the user interface.

Sailors were a simple and superstitious lot on average, and Merrill rather thought that if she made the controls too far outside of their comfort-zone that they would reject the solution outright no matter how useful it was in reality. The two force-emitters, which would be attached to the back of the ship, one on either side of the rudder, were two harmless-looking disks that Merrill had made to resemble the captain's wheel.They lit up, yes, but only when they were actively emitting a propelling force, the rest of the time they looked rather ordinary.

The control panel was a bit of a leap in terms of asking the captains to move out of their comfort-zone. Merrill had made a weatherproof, unbreakable eluvian display-tablet with a single, simple interface-display in its surface. The left side had an image of a large rectangle across a "track." The further forward that the captain pushed the rectangle, the greater amount of force that the rearward force-emitters would emit, the further back towards the bottom of the screen he pulled it, the less force would propel the ship forward. There was a circle on the right hand side of the screen which the captain could put his right hand flat on, when he twisted his hand in one direction the balance of the force emmitors would change, one would emit less force, and one would emit more force, causing the ship to turn as it moved forward. There was a built-in security device for who could access the control panel, and Merrill considered it a mostly done task.

:Perhaps, if they don't like the magic-look of the eluvian interface display, as it does look like something straight out of Arlathan, I might be able to cover it up with something purely mechanical-looking,: she thought.

She might build something like a purely physical lever that could move up and down to control the force of the push, and maybe some kind of dial or lever that moved side to side that controlled the direction. The original display would still be built in under it, of course, since it would be forged into the apparatus when Merrill forged the whole set of it, bus she could put in the mechanical type of interface over-top of it, so that no-one would need to see the magic-display interface underneath and everything would look perfectly (mostly) mundane.

_:But I suppose that's for later, I still have a lot to do before we can even begin to talk about preferences. I'll still need to spell-forge the force-emitters and the control panel, as well as the set of crystal disks that the spellweb will be written into,:_ Merrill thought, with head-sore exhaustion hours later when she had at last put her work to be tested by the diagnostics that Wisdoms book seemed miraculously capable of running.

It was near dawn when she went to bed and she slept in until it was past midday. When she emerged from her bed and into the kitchen, Fenris had already left to go and do whatever it was he found to amuse himself with during the daylight hours, and Pontius was fussing over the stove. If a walking, sentient suit of armor could look both concerned and censorious, Pontius managed it as he pulled out a chair for Merrill and served her a meal that had clearly been left to warm longer than he had intended it to.

"So sorry about the delay on breakfast Pontius," Merrill said contritely. "I stayed up all night working on the solution for the ships of the Alienage and I was so mentally exhausted by the time I'd finished that I slept until I'd slept myself out."

"Mum should be more careful," he said. "Sleep when it is time for sleep and work with moderation."

Merrill smiled a bit wanly even as she internally acknowledged that she was probably not going to listen to that advice. She had an artist's passion for her work, and when a project seized her it took hold of her attention an obsessions iron grip that would keep her nose firmly to the grindstone unti lshe had either collapsed from exhaustion or the work was finished. It was one reason, she supposed, that her friends tended to fuss over her so much, she'd run herself on not noticing that she needed sleep or food, until she'd run herself ragged.

"Lucien!" Merrill called over to the hearth spirit as she finished her breakfast. "I have a new project that I want to forge with you."

"I'm always ready ta help, missus," the hearth-spirit said agreeably.

Merrill pulled out a few of the spare, small "blank" diamonds that she'd forged with a blank spellweb of common construction and the diamond powder mixed with a few alchemical agents and just a touch of lyrium dust as well as a portion of the pure quartz sand she'd started keeping about in anticipation of even more magical projects in the future.

"It sure looks interestin', Missus," Lucien said as Merrill pulled up her work-board with her spellweb design for her experimental force-emitter in it.

"The emitter isn't the interesting part," Merrill said. "It's actually the easiest part of all of this... Hmm..."

Merrill, upon further examination of her "brain" in the apparatus realized that she was going to require a sturdy sort of physical shell to house it in to protect it and keep it safe from jarring or mishaps and she really didn't have either the time or the inclination to fiddle about with it.

_:I'll just ask the Dwarves to build one,:_ she thought with a shrug. _:They're clever with things like this, I'm sure if I pay them well, they can put a rush on it.:_

"I'll be right back, Lucien," Merrill abruptly decided. "I have something I'm going to take care of quickly before we get on with it."

Merrill took up her book and a large bag of gold and silver coins of the largest denominations because she rather thought that the Dwarves would not do such particular work on such short notice without asking for a lot of gold. That was fine, Merrill wasn't all that worried about how much it cost seeing as she fairly seemed to be swimming in coins, her concern was getting it done so the sailors could begin to feed the Alienage.

_:And while I'm there, I can ask them about making a very nice padded case to protect my mirror-book too,_ : she thought, pleased with the idea of solving two problems with one visit.

Merrill had decided that she would go to the same Dwarves of House Tethras that Fenris tended to visit, as from all she could tell they seemed to have treated him well and had filled out his requests without any fuss. If she went to the Shem, she knew, if they didn't refuse her service outright, they'd start interrogating her about where she'd gotten the coins from and why she needed such a weird development in the first place, so Merrill wasn't interested in having to answer and awkward questions. The establishment was in the "dwarven" end of Hightown, where the wealthy Dwarves of the Merchant's Guild seemed to congregate. The Dwarven section of Hightown was located just past the monumental, marble-faced housing-office building that held all of the deeds and records of title in Kirkwall.

:Which reminds me that I really should see about getting on with transferring the house properly into my and Fenris' names,: she mused as she walked past the housing office building.

The building that she arrived at, the site where all of House Tethras' business transactions took place, was another grand-looking, marble-faced edifice, with two great dwarven stone statues flanking the front door. One statue was a smith with a hammer and the other was a fairly clerkish looking fellow holding up a scale with what looked like gold coins piled on it.

_:They should have a statue of Varric holding up a pen with his book!:_ Merrill thought, thinking that her dear friend might look very nice as a statue.

When she walked through the front door there was a tremendous hubbub inside. There were ques for this counter and ques for that counter, all them manned by rather-frowney-faced Dwarven men and women who looked about as happy to be there as the people qued up to see them. Merrill looked about her helplessly, wondering which of the many ques she should join up with, as there was one thing she'd learned in the city it was the unwritten rule that _the line was sacred._ Just as she was trying to look for a sign that said which que was which, a young-looking Dwarf appeared at her elbow. He had a very noticeable resemblance to Varric and he said without preamble

"You're Merrill, Formerly Sabrae, right? This way please."

Merrill blinked at him in surprise almost missing out on following along after him and as she did she was self-consciously aware of the envious eyes of every person in every que looking over at her as she was led toward the back.

"I, um... I don't need any special treatment and... how did you know my name?" she asked, mystified as she stared around her and the ostentatious luxury of the Dwarven Main House.

"The Head of our House left orders," the dwarf said firmly. "You and the other one, can't miss you either one of you what with the tattoos all over, are to be taken _straight_ to Cousin Marricc."

She was herded along at a very brisk pace for someone whose legs were only half as long as her own until she reached a door with a bronze face inlaid in geometric patterns that had a very Dwarven flavor to them. The door slid soundlessly open apparently all by itself and Merrill was deposited in a very lavish-looking office. The low, dwarven-sized desk was made all of fine stone with a glass-smooth face of black obsidian inlaid with what appeared to be opals in more dwarven-style geometric patterns. The glassy tiled stone floor continued the intricate geometric patterns and there were fine artistic vases that were clearly very expensive, and other things with precious metals and gems in them that sparkled with latent wealth. The Dwarf, grey, bearded, with frown-wrinkles on his lips and laugh lines around his eyes looked up at her as though she were an unexpected complication in an already hectic day.

"Um... hullo," Merrill said hesitantly. "I just wanted to... engage a commission, I believe is the term. I have coin, but I'm not so good at crafting plain non-magical things and I've no Master Ilen here in the city."

"We've orders to provide you with whatever you ask for," the dwarf informed her gruffly. "You have a schematic?"

"Yes!" Merrill said quickly, still feeling as though she were being selfish and an imposition. "Right here."

She pulled out her wisdom's tablet and flicked it open, then accessed the three dimensional display of her new apparatus' "brain" which was going to need a case to house it in. The three-dimensional picture of the device she had designed to shove the boats along using a cyclic-repeating force spell with adjustable parameters that was fueled by (as yet non-existant) energist crystals hovered in the air over the surface of her mirror-book written in hard light, with work-boards giving precise dimensions hovering just outside of the picture display pointing inward.

"I need a casing to house this thing in," Merrill said. "I'll also need these little arm-thingies here made so I can house the activation crystals in them. The design itself should be pretty simple, there's the precise parameters of the apparatus here You just have to design a shell around it and find a way to support it that doesn't interfere with its cycling processes. Also, very important, none of it can be made with iron because there's something about the metal that doesn't react so well with magic. Silver, or some kind of metal mixed in with silver would be ideal."

Merrill babbled then trailed off realizing that the dwarf was looking at the holographic display with wide-eyed shock.

"Is... something wrong?" she asked hesitantly.

He stood on short legs and moved around to stare at the schematics, written in hard-light, hovering over the surface of her book.

"You don't need to circle around if you need to look at it another angle," Merrill said helpfully.

She reached in and gently spun the three-dimensional schematic so that he could see all of the angles. She couldn't help her desire to show off her new toy. The only other person who had seen it, one cranky mage-hating magic-disliking elf, had been highly unimpressed with her big breakthrough.

"If you're having trouble with the pieces..."

Merrill reached in and activated a twist in the spellwebs, pulling her palms apart and the schematic gently exploded so that each individual piece separated out and could be examined.

"This is a wonder!" the dwarf said in awe, looking over every bit of the exploded view.

_:And he hasn't even seen the diagnostic mode,:_ Merrill thought with pardonable pride.

"It took a lot of work," Merrill said. "Getting back to the-"

"How much would you want for it?" he asked eagerly.

Merrill looked at him in surprise.

"Oh... um... it's not for sale. Ma seranas. I'm afraid it can only be used by a mage, at least currently."

The dwarf looked disappointed and Merrill felt a bit bad for him.

"So what this casing you want us to make?" he asked gruffly getting straight back to business and Merrill was a bit surprised to have the subject changed so quickly. Apparently Cousin Marricc wasn't one to dwell on disappointment.

"It's to hold the main computational and spellweb array adjustment apparatus, it's sort of the brain. The shell needs to be solid, but also accessible, at least from the top. It should have a lid, because this bracket here," Merrill highlighted the holder that she planned to eventually house the energist crystals. "Will need to be accessed fairly regularly to switch out a used energist with a new one. Also, I'll need two, good solid brackets for the force emittors. They need to be able to take a beating, becaue they'll be pushed on a lot and exposed to all elements on the sea. Also... why not? See if you can't get your people to make something that'll hold a flat, table-like thing, secured to a post abou yea big."

Merrill approximated with her hands.

"Hmm..." the dwarf frowned, humming to himself and looking over the device with an eagel eye. "Something like this, since it is you, will need one of our best. Old Dalan, I think, can be pulled away from whatever it is he's working on. I'll summon him."

Cousin Morric summoned back the younger dwarf from earlier, clearly a page learning the ins and outs of the family business, and gave him an order to go and get Old Dalan. The poor young page looked a bit terrified but resigned and trudged off. Whle they waited, Cousin Marric summoned up another dwarf with orders to bring refreshments. Hearty toasted breads, beer-cheese, cheese, sausages, thin slabs of meat with heavy gravies and ale were brought in on a tray. The closest thing they had to a vegetable was some kind of pickled sprouts. At least there was mustard. Merrill nibbled on bread and cheese and then was coaxed to try a sausage piled with pickled eggs, pickled sausage, cheese and mustard but found it all to be rather good once the strangeness of it was gotten over. She did not drink beer that early in the day however. Morric shrugged in a manner that suggested the words "suit yourself" and lunch was gotten on with.

They were joined in their repast by an elderly dwarf with what looked like some sort of finely-crafted prosthetic hand and a beard that was short-trimmed, wearing a leather blacksmiths apron. He frowned at having been pulled away from his work, but once Merrill showed him the new project with her mirror book, his frown lessened and interest replaced his disapproval. He grunted, pulled out a few sheets of paper from a voluminous pocket and quickly began taking sketches, marked with measurements. He asked a few short questions for clarification then trundled out of the office to get started.

"It's should be finished by the morning," Morric said with a small smile.

"Oh. Thank you very much," Merrill replied. "I do hope I haven't upset things too much."

"He's always like that," Morric replied. "Now, if you'll excuse me young miss, I have to return to my work for the Dwarven Merchant's Guild. Some idiot in Tantervale has decided to pull another bank-note scheme again, and now I have to go over the receipts for every last bank-note issued by our vault here in Kirkwall to prove that none of the notes we've handed out have been false. I wish there were a better way of keeping accurate records and to communicate them between every Dwarven Bank. It looks like the Merchant's Guild is going to shut down the honoring of bank-notes again until this idiot is caught or the scheme blows over, which will mean that commerce will be slower and riskier again. What a pain."

"Oh," Merrill said.

She was aware that such things as coins and bank-notes existed, though because she'd never much traveled outside of Kirkwall after she'd left her clan, she wasn't certain _why_ coins were honored but a bank-note was not in most cases, it all seemed very stange and complicated to her when Varric had tried to explain it. In her culture, the Keeper took care of the needs of the Clan and that was that, coins were used only to trade with outsiders and that was usually handled by either the Keeper or a Hahren.

_:I will probably have to learn about it though,:_ Merrill thought to herself as she made her way back to Fenris' Mansion, where she was staying. "If I'm going to buy supplies from the Dwarves, I will need to know more about how coins and trading works."

But that was a research for another day, she was due to finish her work on her current project now. Once she arrived back in the kitchen, Lucien was waiting for her, his hearth-forge hot and flickering green with veilfire, which was what she would need to forge the spellwebs into the crystal disks of the "brain" that was going to run the alternating, cyclic functions of her spellwebs properly.

"Are you ready already?" Merrill asked, curiously.

"Ready when you are, missus," Lucien said agreeably. "I've already absorbed the spellwebs into my memory and they're ready for transferral."

Merrill blinked, and realized then that, since she'd checked her math and everything was solidly good to go, there was no reason to delay on making the apparatus. She could house it in its new Dwarven-made casing later, but she could just go ahead and forge the heart of it now and test it so that she knew it worked. Suiting thought to action, Merrill pulled out her small bead-sized blank node-crystals and assembled them on the hearth, then pulled out her powdered mineral and crystal mix that would conduct the magical energy to the node-crystals that would activate the functions housed within them and last the special mix of powedered minerals that were going to make the disks that held the spellweb circles in them. In essence, the design was similar in concept to the spellweb array she had already used for the grounding-array for her energist tree. The main difference was that the Functions were more closely akin to the spellwebs of arlathan, making the tranferral of the spell structure used smoother, with less chance of errors in translation. Having Lucien transfer the paramerters of the function nodes to the blank spell crystal on one side of the Fade while she wrote the spellweb functions into the physical spell crystal on the other side of the Fade was an added measure of surety, though it would take a lot of work.

Merrill centered herself and she and Lucien began their work. The node crystals were blank in the sense that they had already been primed when she had forged them in the cold-forge to hold a certain spell-structure for function nodes. When Merrill had designed the functions of her force-spell spellweb array she had designed the nodes in the pattern already written into the blank spellstones so that she wouldn't have to do as much work, merely plug in the values and let the stone do the rest. Even with the aid of the preforged spellstones, Merrill still had to do a lot of work, for she had to forge the crystal disks using veilfire by melting the mineral mix and, like with the mirror, make certain that the cores all aligned as they were needed to. Then she had to forge the magical flowpaths while the holding-disks were still cooling in a semi-solid state. The flowpaths were made of two minerals that didn't generally interact well, and she had to forge them together into a specific structure that would conduct precise amounts of magical energy and yet insulate that same energy from outside resonance so that aural magical feilds would not interact with it and cause complications down the line. It was almost a relief when she could simply pop the prewritten node-crystals into thier slots and flash-solidify the spell-crystals into a solid set of crystaline disks.

Cooling on the hearth were three flat, heavy disks, each about the size of a dinner plate, made of a silvery-dark glassy substance. There were grooved lines etched deeply into their surfaces, filled most of the way with a hard, blackish-silvery metalic glass, which was studded at regular intervals with a round, bead-like gem that when the light hit it right, looked like it had some sort of three-dimensional elven knotwork captured in its heart, like a leaf in ice.

"Let's see if the disks will all hover over each other like they're supposed to..." Merrill muttered.

When she had studied it she'd had her doubts. Merrill laid the bottom-most disk on the hearth face up and handled the middle-most disk by its edges, holding it in the air over the surface of the bottom disk, and to her suprise, did indeed feel a force pushing lightly back at her. When she took her hands away, the middle disk remained floating there and she then took the top disk and stacked it last, pleased to see that they all hovered there sanwiched together but with plenty of space between them. She did not activate the spellweb arrays themselves, as the force spells did not yet have anywhere to go and activating a magic with no outlet was _never_ a good idea.

"Well, I suppose we had better get started on the next part," she said to Lucien as she carefully tucked the heavy black crystaline disks away and pulled out the ingredients for the next part of the project.

The force-emmittors would not be nearly as complicated as the "brain" designed to run them, but they were going to need to be very sturdy. Once she had the crystaline receiving-core forged, the outer shell of the emittor would be made of a variotion on the elven steel-glass which would be able to withstand both the force-pressure from the emittors and the vibrational forces of the spell-resonance at the core. It took most of the afternoon for Merrill and Lucien the melt down and core-restucture enough materials for the two force emittors, working with Veilfire as a forge was exhausting work as was needing to write the spell in two states, the state of reality and its mirror-echo in the Fade. What she was left with when the exhausting labor was at last complete was a set of three heavy rings about five inches thick made of a milky, transluscent glassy material that gleamed, like moonstones, with a bluish color. The central core which received the commands it received from the brain and transmitted them to the force-emittors, was a round, glassy orb. The two rings on the outside of the core would fit together tightly, close, but not touching, thier forces keeping them spinning in opposing directions. The faster they spun, the greater the power buildup and the more force would be emitted outward form the surface.

"Last one..." Merrill muttered, heaving aside the heavy glassy force emittors only with help from Pontius.

"I think ya oughta give it a rest fer the day, Missus," Lucien said. "It's almost dark an' you've been workin' fer hours. You flesh-beings get tired if you work fer too long with going still ta join the Fade or absorbing the energy from food."

Merrill was too tired from her labor to disagree with him, so she climbed to her feet and turned around to discover that Pontius had set the table with a meal while she had been absorbed in her work. He'd apparently gotten hold of a cookbook from somewhere, or, maybe Wisdom or Lucien had simply deposited the knowledge of one into whatever it was he had for a mind because there was a selection of things Merrill knew she'd never made before.

"My goodness, Pontius!" Merrill exclaimed in amazement at the variety of food.

"Ser Fenris has made the selection of the menu for the week, mum," Pontius informed her.

"Oh, well, I suppose if it makes him happy..." she shrugged. "Speaking of which..."

She was about to ask where Fenris was if he'd gone to the trouble of picking out what it was he wanted to eat but he appeared in the doorway wearing... _not_ his usual armor. It seemed that the elf had been to visit a tailor, for he was wearing an ensemble that was made of cloth for perhaps the first time Merrill had ever known him. He wore a formal coat of some shiny black material with silver round buttons holding it closed at his waist and geometric embroidery patterns in silver thread along the turned-out collar. There was a baldric of silver draped crosswise over his chest holding his greatsword in place on his back, and he wore a spotless, white silk long-sleeved tunic underneath his formally-cut coat with lacings at his collarbones that were also silver. His fitted black pants had a small band of matching silver geometric embroidery down the outside seam. All in all, he looked surprisingly dapper and Merrill wondered just what it was he was getting up to that required such a formal looking change of clothes.

_:I suppose it's not any of my worry,:_ she thought with a shrug.

"Good evening Fenris," she said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and sitting down.

"Witch," he greeted with a nod in his same dour tone as he sat himself. "I can smell your magic all over this place. What have you been up to?"

Merrill was pleased he showed an interest and promptly dove into an in-depth explanation of her newest project while he drank wine with his dinner until his eyes glazed over. Or maybe that was boredom... Either way, he didn't seem inclined to make as much a fuss about her magical work as he usually did, so Merrill took that as a sign that perhaps he was starting to come round a bit.

"And that reminds me," she added, after she'd concluded her explanation. "I meant to tell you to not make any plans for tomorrow."

"And why not?" he demanded.

"When I was visiting House Tethras today, I ran across the City Housing Office, and it reminded me that I really should be about getting the deed on this place settled properly."

Fenris paused in raising his wine-goblet to his lips.

"...Truly?" he said in some surprise.

"I don't see why not," Merrill said. "We can both go tomorrow and take up residence officially, that way Aveline doesn't have to arrange guard schedules to pretend like no-one lives here anymore. I can lift the Master Key, and really that's the only restriction on the deed to this house. That and taxes, I suppose, but we've both coin enough to cover that, I'm sure."

"That would be... appreciated," Fenris said. "And... you will put _my_ name on the ownership roll?"

"Of course," she said, perplexed as to why he was even asking. "Though I really must say, this whole fuss about who owns what and where and how still bewilders me sometimes. That's not much how things are done among the Dalish."

"Do the Dalish not own their own land-ships?" fenris questioned archly, using the common word instead of the proper elven term Arravell.

"The Clan collectively owns the arravells," Merrill explained. "The Keeper decides who uses which based on the need, and if a dispute arises anyway, it's generally settled by the Hahren."

"Then what of possessions?" he asked next. "Do the Dalish not own their own things? That thing you have that we fought the varterral for?"

"It is not mine," Merrill said readily. "Not in the sense you city-dwellers use anyway. If a Dalish Keeper were to walk in that door tomorrow and demand it back to be used by the people, I would acquiesce immediately. The aruin'holm is merely in my safe-keeping until another of the people have need of it."

"What of those Dalish tents you use then," he asked next in a slightly frustrated tone.

Merrill paused.

"Well, I think I do see your point there. Families use the ger. When a pair wish to officiate their life-bonding by creating their own family, they usually start by gathering the materials to build their own ger," Merrill said, nodding.

"So your house is like one ridiculously large ger that is made of stone, cannot fit into an arravell and could hold two full Clans in it, then?" she teased him. "Are you planning on finding many life-mates to put up in many different rooms?"

"Funny," he grumbled. "And it isn't as though you haven't grown citified over the time you've been in Kirkwall. You certainly caught on to the idea of ownership readilly enough when it comes to that library of mine that you've taken over."

Merrill acknowledged that he did indeed have a valid point. She rather considered that library the same way she would have considered her own ger being "her personal space" if she had lived back in her Clan and had moved into her own ger someday... if she'd ever taken a lifemate or had a match arranged for her.

"We shall go to the Housing Office tomorrow then, first thing in the morning," Fenris said decisively.

"I can't go first thing," Merrill said apologetically. "I have the last part of my project to finish in the morning."

"Why not finish it tonight?" he asked, frowning.

"I can't tonight, I'm magically exhausted because I've been working all day. You _said_ no blood magic, so I'll have to wait for my reserves to refill, but I promised Saena and Philomela that I would have the solution I promised them ready by tomorrow... and I have to go to the Dwarves to pick up the thing that I asked them to design to hold my magical apparatus."

Fenris looked dissatisfied and said

"If you wait until the noontime the lines will be very long and we shall have to wait."

"I can't do it any earlier, just bring a book," Merrill replied sensibly.

He huffed impatiently and argued

"Your project can wait a few more hours if it must wait over-night anyway. We can go first thing in the morning, when the lines are not very long, then when we are done there... I will feed you and you will be refreshed and energetic for your magical nonsense."

Merrill blinked at Fenris in surprise. He had just offered to feed her. Fenris tended to veiw offers of food as tempting bribes, possibly a hold-over from his days as a slave... had he just offered her what he saw as a tempting bribe to get her to do something?

_:It must really be important to him, like that "no blood magic" promise he keeps mentioning every other breath. I suppose there's no harm in giving him what he wants then. It'll help keep harmony in our little Clan, and he certainly looks like he is poised to be stubborn and argue about it all night,_ : Merrill thought. _:It's not as though my apparatus is going anywhere and I still have two more to make after I test this first one for soundness. Plus, It'll give the dwarven worksmiths more time to finish the project I've asked of them.:_

"Very well Fenris," Merrill said agreeably. "We shall go tomorrow, first thing in the morning."

"Don't stay up late, Witch," he commanded. "I'll have you out of bed at dawn if I must use a bucket."

Merrill laughed a bit, but Fenris' face said he wasn't joking. Pontius cleared away dinner while Merrill went to the library to pick up her work on the tranlating the spellweb arrays from ancient arlathan into a great wardweb that might possibly be made to work in the modern days.

_:And in another few days, my spell-tree will have grown large enough to bloom and generate it's first fruit!:_ Merrill thought excitedly. _:Then I can harvest it, transfer the power from the fruit to my pre-forged energist stones and see if it really will wok or not!:_

Merrill looked forward to exciting days ahead.

* * *

**If the recent chapter(s) seems a bit strange it's because it's essentially being written as I post it. I have a lot of story left to go, however there are events that occur in the first draft that I feel really need a much better and earlier introduction to build them up in a way that makes sense, and so I've chosen to address it in this, the second draft. Please forgive me for spelling errors and grammar, I've tried to catch them all, but... well... my mind is a much more enthusiastic writer than my fingers are unfortunately and I've never been able to train myself to look at the screen when I type. Hope you all enjoy I looked forward to posting more soon.  
**


	25. Chapter 25

Contrary to what she had said, Merrill found herself unable to resist the siren call of her work, and did stay up for a good portion of the night working on a few tweakings to her boat-pushing apparatus for the next two she was going to forge. Lucien had to remind her twice of the timer she had set for him to remind her to get some sleep so that she could avoid an impatient Fenris and his threatened bucket of water. Oddly, it was she who woke first and went to the kitchen for breakfast but did not find him there.

"Fenris!" she called up the stairs. "Get yourself ready, we're going down to the housing office to sign the place over to you this morning!"

He appeared at the top of the landing, fully dressed with his sword polished and sharpened on his back. He had apparently taken his armor out to be seen to by a professional arcane smith, for her wore a dapper version of the clean-lined suit he had worn the day before. The formal coat was long and black with a turned out collar with braiding and embroidery, the shirt he wore under it was white silk rather than linen, his pants pleated with a thick band of silver geometric patterns embroidered up the outside seams and his new, matching belt pouches looked heavy with coin (and probably his other customary necessities). His hair even looked less like his usual frosty crows nest and more like it might have seen the good side of a brush!

"Well don't you turn up handsome," Merrill complimented him.

His scowl was less severe than usual, though his reply was as brusque as ever.

"Let us be on our way, witch," he said preceding her into the bright light of late morning in Kirkwall.

Merrill shook her head in bemusement at his back, wondering if she should feel relieved or exasperated that some things never seemed to change.

The trip to the housing office in Hightown went swiftly, though the sight of two elves who were not servants walking around in the high-class area reserved for shemlen still drew a glance or two. Some even stared at Fenris, and Merrill thought it odd they would do so since they had to be accustomed to seeing him around as he'd lived there for so long but then she quickly reconsidered; Fenris did not go out of his way to broadcast his presence, partly as a way to keep the house he'd been squatting in. The edifice they arrived at was all gleaming white marble, and pillars and carvings along all the edges. Merrill had grown up in ruins that were pretty in their own way, but mostly they were all rundown and crumbling. The Housing Office in Kirkwall was so new and shiny-looking by comparison that Merrill found herself feeling a little bit intimidated.

The first thing they saw upon entry were people standing in long lines everywhere. There were mazes of hallways and doors with shiny plaques next to them, each of them had a line of about twenty people at the very least waiting outside of it. They waited in line to approach a large desk across the entryway and were given a small slip of paper with a number written on it and directed to go and stand in an area to the left and wait for their number to be called.

Merrill was glad that she'd thought to bring her dear notebook with her, for they were left waiting there for a very long time. She got to work sketching out the spellwebs and working on the equations for her upcoming project as there was still a lot of minutia to attend to and she couldn't expect Wisdom to do all of it for her! At last some bored-looking clerk called their number, waved them up to a desk and asked what street address their property was found on. Fenris gave the address and the clerk, a fat little human who was not Dwarven but probably ought to have been, waddled over to a tower of large drawers, pulled one upon, riffled through it for a moment a pulled out a dusty file that matched the ones that Merrill had pulled from the hidden vault under the map-table in the library.

"Address forms, please," he said in a peremptory tone.

Merrill looked helplessly at Fenris, uncertain of the protocol, but Fenris had apparently talked to _someone_ , for he confidently selected out the stack of files in their possession and slid them across the clerks messy desk. He pulled out a large magnifying lens and skimmed down each of the pages, peering closely at them as though looking for flaws.

"Master Key," he demanded next as he pulled a sort of strange little box out of the drawer and inserted a little metal tab that had been attached to his coppy of the file. 

The puddgy, bored-sounding shemlen inserted the metal tab, which seemed to be decorated with a large numer of runes, into the top of the oddly decorated little metal box.

"Insert your key into the box, please," he said in a bored tone. "This is to verify your ability to hold the premises and fulfil the conditions placed in the will and documentation of the rights to deeds. Failure to do so will see you evicted immediately from the premises."

Merrill, feeling a little bit nervous now, took ot the Master Key and inserted it into the fake keyhole in the little box. There was a strange little pulse that jolted over her aura, as though someone had sent a magical probe over her, the Master Key glowed, the box made and odd humming, ticking noise and she noticed that two little crystals on the side, one rad that had been lit up dimmed and a green one right next to it lit up. There was a gentle pinging chirp from the box.

"You may remove your key," he said, turning his attention right back to teh sheaf of papers they'd handed him, continuing to examine them minutely under his magnification lens for seeral more minutes while merrill, bored opened her notebook back up and began working on her formulas again.

"Fine then," he said sounding both bored and suspicious. "Everything seems to be in order with your authentication papers...." he harrumphed, clearing his throat while still somehow managing to sound disapproving. Said Holder of Master Key is in possession of... "

He peered closely down at the pages in his hands, adjusted his lenses and cleared his throat.

"One townhouse located in Hightown District, Kirkwall. No carriage or stabling provided. One private lot in Kirkwall private marina, Semperia, lot One-Oh-Seven, one clipper-class vessel registered, reported salvaged three years previous to this date by Guardswoman Aveline Hendrick. All attendant fees and taxes thereof are the responsibility of the claimant."

The man peered at Fenris and Merrill.

"That's _you_ ," he clarified for good measure, his tone implying that he did not feel they were bright enough to have understood that particular detail.

Fenris nodded, and began to reach for the papers, expecting that the clerk was done, but stopped frozen as the little man continued to go on.

"Other properties deeded to the possessor of said Master Key include buildings and acreage in the Sini Valley, three miles outside of the Northwest mile mark of Kirkwall off the Val Chalon Road. Said property consists of the following: one vineyard with attached barn, stable for three donkeys, grape-presses numbering four, storage cellars and attendant outbuildings numbering five. In addition; seven pensioner-cottages, twelve tennant-huts for, and two field-hands barracks of three hundred square feet at the foundation two levels high on acreage attached. Acreage of the vineyard proper numbering seventy. Acreage of support land numbering fifteen. Attached Villa and grounds an additional fifteen acres. Revenues and upkeep to be assessed by the Clerk of Home Farms."

Fenris looked over at her in surprise and Merrill shrugged, this having been the first she'd heard of it. The clerk wasn't done yet.

"Foreign properties deeded to the owner of said title _also_ include: one modest townhouse of fifteen hundred square feet at the foundation, two additional levels, located in Song Blossom Court, in the city of Starkhaven with attendant rental at stables, one carriage, one carriage house with servants loft. All attendant fees and taxes paid by claimant, that's _you_."

Fenris looked speechless. Merrill was wondering how in the _world_ one person could propose to live in two places at once! The little man continued one, either oblivious to, or utterly unconcerned with their respective reactions to the news of their unexpected wealth of property.

"One large townhouse in Rialto; Temero District in Glass Quarter. Main house, five thousand square feet at the foundation five additional levels, attached courtyard, carriage-house, stabling for seven horses, private boat dock in Marina Andalous, lot Seven-Oh-Three, private boat, one Anastzia by name, reported stolen two years previous."

Merrill looked over at Fenris in surprise. Owning one house purely for ones own use seemed the height of extravagance to her but she'd heard that people owned several at a time... which just seemed crazy to her as one could not possibly live in them all at once!

The man went on to discuss the small fleet of ships that the previous owner had owned outright that had all either been salvaged, sunk at sea or repossessed in the docks they'd rotted in over time since there had been no-one to claim them. Fenris couldn't expect income from said fleet it was explained, but the little man didn't know that Fenris wasn't actually in a position to _need_ said income. Even if Fenris had not possessed the secret treasure in the vault and _had_ owed back-taxes on all lands and properties listed, he'd still be living fine if his only interest was the house in Kirkwall; all he would have needed to do was sell the properties in foreign parts that he was about to own. As it sat, once the claim of ownership and transferal was complete, Fenris was looking at owning not _one_ property but _several_. His own stores of wealth from the vault would cover any fees or taxes for the foreseeable future and he could enjoy his new found wealth and property without worry. Merrill certainly wasn't interested in it. She might have a Dalish love of travel, but that love of travel did not include running about living in houses in other cities apparently merely for the fun of it.

:No let Fenris have them and enjoy them,: Merrill decided. :He liked being a city-elf and it would be nice to see himpleased with something for a change.:

The assessor of documents then harrumphed a bit, took out a slip of paper with writing already on it, dripped some blue wax with what looked like silver dust mix in it on the bottom of the page, pulled out a stamp that glowed a dull blue on one end and Merrill had to stop herself from bending over in curiosity to have a closer look at the interior spell workings to see if she could figure out how they worked. He stamped the wax and added it to the top of their file then told them to go to a different room number to have their individual claimant fees, back-taxes owed, and court-fees assessed.

They went over to another long cue in front of yet _another_ office. Merrill pulled out her notebook again and started working on her project, leaving Fenris to both guard the documents and nudge her along when the line got any shorter. The clerk they found in that office _was_ a dwarf, old with a snowy beard and spectacles as thick as the ends of Fenris' wine bottles. He looked over the seal from the other office as well as the authentication documents, ran a few of the deeds and titles he dug out from in the strongbox once Merrill unlocked it with the copy master key over some dwarven device that looked like a book with metal inlaying the cover instead of pages. It pinged and whirred and clicked and clattered a bit and the dwarf grunted at last and said.

  
"Well its all in order then... wait a bit."

He stuck his head out of the office door.

"Scamp!" he roared out. "I said Scaaamp!"

He waited a few moment mumbling about how the boy was never around when he was needed. A few minutes later a boy of about thirteen came scampering up to the door at a run.

"Yes Seventh Clerk Storigg?" he asked out of breath.

"Take this," he handed him the slip of paper he'd written on. "Go to the seventh archive vault and tell Rorik that I need these files pulled out!"

"Yessir," the boy said with a quick duck of his head to approximate a bow.

"And be quick about it," the dwarf added. "I'm getting old waiting on you."

"Yessir," he said, took the paper and ran off.

Despite the urging to hurry it was some time later when the poor boy returned, likely due to the depths of the vault he'd had to spelunk down to find the moldy old documents. The boy returned carrying a small crate with thick lock-box of documents stacked on top of it.

"These are them," the boy said. "Did you need anything else, can I have lunch now?'

Merrill reached almost on instinct into her own pouch for a roll and cheese to give the boy.

"Here you are now," Merrill said kindly. "I've never met a boy your age who wasn't hungry. All that running around needs fuel. I've water too."

The look he gave her when she fed him was one usually reserved for saints and saviors of puppies. Merrill smiled beatifically at the boy, pleased to see him doing well and working hard to earn a snack. The dwarf looked sharply over at her under bushy brows but chose to say nothing. He sat back down at his desk, unlocked the box, and flicked his eyes expertly over the documents contained therein. He pulled over a heavy-looking contraption with lots of buttons and a strange crank on the side, started tapping on buttons which made an odd sort of clickety whirring noise, and periodically harrumphed and turned the crank, which made paper appear from the top. Merrill was fascinated by the device and watched him curiously.

"Do you think he'd let me have a look inside if I asked very nicely?" Merrill leaned over and asked Fenris quietly while the dwarf worked on his machine.

"No," the elf said.

"Even if I asked very nicely and offered my other roll? Do you think maybe then?"

"Not a chance," Fenris replied. "But if you're so curious about it, why don't you find a dwarf to make one for you or sell one to you. I'm sure you can find one in Varric's lot."

"Oh!" Merrill brightened. "That would work too. Just look at all those little bits and how they work together! It's as neat as an eluvian, and it actually works with no magic Fenris!"

The slightly cranky-looking dwarfs features seemed to soften a bit at her admiration of his wonderful machine.

"Silly wi- er, _woman_ ," Fenris said, nearly giving away her mage-secret by a slip up. "Not everything in this world needs magic to work."

The dwarf reached the end of whatever it was that he was dong on his machine, cleared his throat and said

"You have back-taxes and fees owed on all of your properties. Each city and province has assessed them for each year and tacked on all additional fees applied, then sent them to this office to be recorded and all accounts kept updated. Not counting the fees owed for the service rendered also featured in agreements made, you own a sum total of money to the limit of one million seven hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred forty nine in the common currency."

Fenris stood frozen before the desk and Merrill, not really understanding how much money that was, said

"That's a lot isn't it?"

"Yes, wi-er woman, that is a lot," Fenris managed in a rather strangled tone of voice.

"Can you manage it?" she asked.

Fenris appeared to mentally weigh something for a long moment. After a little bit he turned to the dwarf and asked

"How long will be given to me to gather the coin and can a schedule of payments be arranged or will the guild bank require me to arrange such a sum all at once?"

The dwarf looked back at Fenris for a very long moment and said

"You are.. certain, you will not simply sell of the excess properties, young man? Their respective cities have offered to generously waive the back taxes owed if any claimant wished to simply be rid of them with no fees. I can assure you that the attendant back-taxes on the mansion in Hightown are manageable."

"No, that won't be necessary," Fenris said. "Now, all at once, or in installments?"

The dwarf continued to regard Fenris with disbelief for a long moment.

"You are aware that this sum of money is... enormous, are you not? You _can_ count this high, yes?"

Feris narrowed his eyes at the dwarf, and gritted

"Yes. I can count that high. I am not an imbecile."

There was a long pause.

"Very well then young man," the dwarf said. "Since you and your lovely young lady here are the claimants, and clearly able to lift the Master Key, you are allowed to take possession of the rightful titles and deeds to the lands. However, the money owed for all back-taxes on the lands between the death of the old holder and your current claim _must_ be paid, or a significant amount of it put forward as a down payment and a schedule of payments arranged, with the lands a collateral on a default of course, before your claim can be ratified and all of the properties signed over to your name. This guild bank offers such a service in-house, at a reasonable rate of interest should you choose to pursue it, and I would counsel that you _do_ ; the Carta are not known for their reasonableness."

Merrill at last understood. The dwarf thought Fenris was going to sell his sword to the Carta in exchange for the money needed to pay for getting all those silly papers stamped and sealed or whatever it was they did with it. She wanted to step forward and tell the dwarf that wasn't necessary and they could go ahead and pay the money right then and there, but Fenris' sharp, pointy elbow rammed itself into her stomach and when Merrill looked over to see what was wrong, he glared at her to be quiet. She knew that glare. Confused, but trusting his judgement, Merrill silenced herself.

"I thank you for your counsel, and will consult on the matter," Fenris said with a small bow he must have picked up in Tevinter.

"This office will retain these papers until you can pay the quarter-sum of the total in coin, specie or other appraisable goods," the dwarf said with a sigh, shrugging his shoulders. "You may keep the Master Key with you, as no other claimant may come forward without that key."

"Very good," Fenris said with a final bow and he tugged Merrill by the arm out.

She opened her mouth to ask him immediately why he had not told the dwarf he could pay it off up front but he shot her another glare to silence her, and, confused, she obeyed. They walked quickly back to the mansion, which was still not yet either of theirs to live in free and clear, though if anyone wanted to try to oust them from it they would have had a fight on their hands.

"Why didn't you tell them that you had the money to pay for it?" she asked.

"Too many uncomfortable questions," he replied. "They might have started asking where I'd gotten said money, and then the city might have had to investigate and then, well... I'm one man alone guarding a dragon's hoard of treasure. I'd not give long odds on my guarding it for long."

"Oh. I see," she said. "So what are you going to do then?"

"Wait," he said.

Merrill looked at him in inquiry.

"If I wait a while," he explained. "About a week probably, the clerks at the guild bank will assume I've gone to the Carta for a loan. The Carta, who undoubtedly have agents in that Office, probably already knows that I'm trying to claim all the property and would need the money to do so. _They_ will expect me to turn to them for the ready coin and when I fail to do so, they will assume that I've either taken a loan from the Merchant's Guild Bank, or directly from House Tethras, as I am known to have direct ties to it, or from some _other_ nefarious dealer somewhere. They certainly won't be expecting me to just magic up the money from my basement. Each one will think I've gone to the other, and thus, none of them will investigate the origins of my coin to closely as it is not their interest to stir up trouble among their rivals. So when I show up with the quarter payment of... how much did he say?"

Merrill glanced down at the parchment the dwarf had given her and recited the number written there.

"Four hundred thirty three thousand three hundred eighty seven in the common currency," she recited after puzzling out the number system used in common, then glanced down again.

"And a quarter-bit," she added.

Fenris whistled.

"Well its not a million, but it's still a lot. But when I show up with that, they'll all assume I borrowed it from someone else."

"Oh, that's very clever," she congratulated him.

"it puzzles me witch," he said after a drawn out silence, in which Merrill was partly tempted to return to her notebook.

"What does, Fenris?" she asked.

"Your... generosity," he said. "You were quite correct in pointing out that when it comes to the vault hidden away under this house, neither I nor anyone else would have been aware of it's existence, let alone been able to access it without your unusual skillset. You found it, you unlocked it, there are many who would argue that despite my residence here, the spoils of your work should belong to you, and yet you have chosen to share it equally with me. Even a portion of it would be more than I would have ever seen if I had lived for several lifetimes. Certainly it could have bought me _with_ all of my lyrium several times over."

"You are not a commodity Fenris," Merrill said disapprovingly.

"regardless," he ignored her. "I wonder if you truly understand what it is you have given up to me."

"I will be the first to admit that coins and money is not my area of expertise," she replied after pausing a moment to think over what he'd said. "And you might be right, perhaps in the future I might regret being so generous, but I don't feel bad about it now. It seems to make you happy and thats always a good thing in my book."

"Why do you care so much what does and does not make me happy," he said, apparently confused by it all.

"Why would I want my lethalliin to be unhappy?" Merrill asked, equally confused.

"I am not your clansman. you have no clan," He pointed out coldly, for once refraining to say that that lack was due entirely to her own bad choices and she took his unexpected leniency on the matter as progress.

"Well then, without a Clan, you and my other friends, Isabella, and Aveline, and Varric and Hawke and Anders, wherever those two are... you're the closest thing I have. I share a roof with you, and food with you. You're quite cranky enough all on your own without me going out of my way to try to make your temper even worse. Keeping harmony within the Clan is something else a Keeper should strive to do."

"... Foolish Witch," he said, apparently for lack of anything else to say to her.

Merrill smiled over at him, taking that as her signal to depart and leave him to his bottle of wine, while she went back to her various projects. She had a garden of helpful healing herbs to harvest and a stillroom to work in, plus there was todays batch of blank energist crystals to prime for their eventual use as repositories of magical energy after she had harvested her spell tree, which had begun to show signs of reaching the final threshold before it flowered and bore "fruit" packed with concentrated magical energy. There was also the other two force-spell apparatuses for the alienage's ships to forge as well as her ongoing little project involving a potential solution to the alienages desperate lack of housing and proper living conditions.

_:Whatever Fenris decides to do on the matter of his sudden property I suppose is for him to sort out,"_ Merrill thought with a shrug as she turned her attention back to the things that interested her. _:It's certainly no nevermind of mine.:_

With that, she departed for the back of the house, leaving Fenris standing in the atrium staring after her with an unreadable look on his face.


End file.
